World-building

My recommendation boils down to "don't sweat the details."

I don't mean that you shouldn't build out that world and have it ready to suit the story. But think about what happens as you go about your own life. Are you always thinking about the history of a building, or the mythology of a symbol?

Think about your character, think *like* your character. If you don't mind the bastardization of a saying, "What Would This Character Do/Think?"

At least, that works for me.

robjvargas said:

Think about your character, think *like* your character. If you don't mind the bastardization of a saying, "What Would This Character Do/Think?"

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+1

One time I tried to explain the origins of a symbol by a certain character asking about it. The character wasnt normally interested in that kind of thing, but at the time I thought it was ok to have the other person explain it and then say "what YOU so interested for all of the sudden" kinda thing, but it just wasnt right. It was obvious I was just trying to show the origins of the symbol.

You just have to find the right context. If you want certain worldbuilding elements/magic rules to be understood by the reader by a certain point in your story, try and make an earlier LOGICAL reference to it earlier on, make a scene where it might be reasonable to explain what the deal is.

Face twisted by contempt, the guard raised his blooded hand to smite the beggar anew. He seemed to have forgotten about the image of a shield bearing an outstretched hand on his breast, the very symbol that meant he had sworn to protect people like the man he was beating.

Getting the flow of world-building details right is something I tend not to worry about until the second draft. For me, this is one of those things I find impossible to get right the first time.

For the first draft, I tend to write things in as I think of them, then redistribute/rewrite/foreshadow/allude to/cut/ as necessary once I've got the characters and plot worked out.

Then, as the others said, it is so much easier to fit things in as your characters think/react to things, and to have their observations fit their personalities and prior experiences.

--Greensquares

Discord said:

One of the pleasures of a good fantasy story is exploring a new and fascinating world, and all the details and facets therein. But it's not always easy to communicate all these details and pace the story out well.

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The first error is in thinking you need "to communicate all these details". It's one thing to develop a solid, consistent concept of your Fantasy setting. It's another thing, and not necessarily a good one, to obsess over presenting the reader with every little thing you put into it.

For me, the best Fantasy world presentation I've read is Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea series, and other than a map at the beginning of the first book, everything the reader needs to know is part of the story, and is provided as necessary at the proper moment. I'd recommend studying how she did that.

caw

GreenSquares said:

For the first draft, I tend to write things in as I think of them, then redistribute/rewrite/foreshadow/allude to/cut/ as necessary once I've got the characters and plot worked out.

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Yup. I second this method. Just get your setting right the first time around. Work out some world building details later. I find readers like world building, but not at the expense of the characters or the plot. I don't give a flying weasel if you wrote an entire economic textbook on how the economy in New World X works, but I do care when you have no idea how a supply chain works or what it takes to keep a farm running. Also, if there is a military involved, they need a supply chain. If you're backpacking, you're not making stew every night for dinner. Talk to a boy scout if you have your characters doing a lot of out door traveling; I learned a lot about the types of things you would be carrying and how you set up a quick-and-dirty camp.

I second blacbird's advice of re-reading books that are similar to yours and seeing how those writers did it. You may even want to grab a highlighter, actually, and mark all the sections where information about the world is delivered, either through plot, description, dialogue, etc. In other words, if you're having trouble with a particular aspect of storytelling, I recommend studying it. Just consciously pay attention, that's all, just like you would any other part of narrative.

Adding onto what discord said, anything that adds to "tone" should be, for lack of a better term, cool. IMO

Discord said:

I once read a book (no names!) that included a world in which most people drank this hot, dark, bitter beverage in the morning. The beverage was called "Kloh" (or something, I can't remember) and it was hot, and had properties that woke people up. The author described all these details so that we would understand that people were drinking coffee, or something in all social and chemical ways very similar to coffee, but she felt she needed to use a new name because, I guess, that makes the world sound more exotic? But to me, it was a waste of exposition time when she could have just said, "coffee".

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If it's the book I'm thinking of, it's klah. Yeah, stuff like that throws me out of the narrative, because I notice and then I'm like, wait, if these people have names for things here that aren't our names, but are still speaking English... hang on, crap, they shouldn't be speaking English in the first place, because it's a different world, why would they have English?... immersion fail.

Sooo, it might be a good idea to consciously collect examples of worldbuilding fail, as well.

RichardGarfinkle said:

That's a trope of bad world building named "Calling a rabbit a smerp."

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Speaking of rabbits, there's only one time I've seen this where it didn't bother me, and that's in Watership Down. I don't mind whatsoever that the rabbits call a car a hrudu or eating "silflay" or whatever. I wonder why it works there and doesn't elsewhere? I'm guessing it has something to do with the fact that, in the first example, their understanding of cars is quite different from ours, and in the second, it's referring to their particular eating ritual. But, then again, they had their own words for things like dandelions, didn't they? Clearly it's time for my 9th or 10th re-reading, 'cause I'm not going to be able to stop thinking about this until I figure it out.

Good writing is good writing is good writing. Write it right, and everything else will fall into place, including world building. In my opinion, writing it right comes one sentence at a time. It's like playing golf. You have to work hard and take lessons and learn the game, but when it comes down to that day's 18 holes, you have to take it one shot at a time.

Yorkist said:

I don't mind whatsoever that the rabbits call a car a hrudu or eating "silflay" or whatever. I wonder why it works there and doesn't elsewhere? I'm guessing it has something to do with the fact that, in the first example, their understanding of cars is quite different from ours, and in the second, it's referring to their particular eating ritual.

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I'll bet a lot of your acceptance comes from them being rabbits, something we know and accept as familiar. So you can understand that they see cars differently, and eat differently.
In fantasy and science fiction, (generally, frequently) the POV characters are either human (us)or human-analog (us, again). Even if they're aliens, or elves or machines, if they are the POV, the mind tends to make the unfamiliar into us. So, we accept the convention that words written in English are a convention, and that everything is taking place in some other language.
So, the 'foriegn' terms break the illusion. If everything else is translated, why not these terms? We accept it if the thing described is so unfamiliar that it needs a new term, but not if it's only another word for coffee.
Which is where 'YMMV' comes into play: if you read a lot of fantasy/science fiction you will have a narrower range of 'acceptance'. Ever read a name and description of some strange, author-created race, or unfamiliar device and though "Oh, elves" or, "Oh, phone"*? To a novice in the genre, these are new ideas, needing new words.

*I admit that I struggle to find a suitable piece of technology. When I chose 'phone' I was thinking of 'Star Trek's 'communicator', which got a new name because it was new tech, at the time. Now it's just a big, clunky smart-phone with a lot of apps. Kirk would stare with dropped-jaw astonishment at what a teenager is using these days.

RichardGarfinkle said:

I think it works there because we have what amounts to an alien perspective on things we recognize so the connotations of the rabbit words aren't the same as ours. But in the case of the smerp it's the same meaning as our idea of rabbit, but disguised.

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frimble3 said:

I'll bet a lot of your acceptance comes from them being rabbits, something we know and accept as familiar. So you can understand that they see cars differently, and eat differently.

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Yeah, you guys are right. It serves to redefine the relationship between the characters and an object that's familiar to us.

Now that I think about it, silflay is a really interesting one. It's really a name for a type of meal, the grazing that rabbits prefer to do at dawn and dusk, which is the "natural" time for rabbits to prefer to eat, according to the narrator. (They can silflay at other times, but it doesn't have the same relaxing ritual to it.) Well, of course rabbits prefer to eat at dawn and dusk, because that's the time when neither daytime nor nighttime predators can see very well. I don't think the narrator ever explicitly says this. But the inclusion of a special term for this kind of eating (as opposed to, say, eating the stolen produce from a garden, which I think is just "eating") serves to bring the rabbit perspective into greater relief for the reader, whether on a conscious level or not.

ETA: And I realize that I am Queen of the Tangents, so to bring it back around to the thread topic, I think that Richard Adams is an excellent worldbuilder - and I'm not a reader who has historically paid a lot of attention to worldbuilding, so take that with a grain of salt - and he basically just tells you about the world in the voice of the narrator, but he only tells you about detail X of the world when detail X becomes necessary to understand what's going on in that immediate moment. Terry Pratchett does the same thing. I'd rather have that than clumsy character-as-expositionary-device dialogue or thoughts. (Do you have to have omniscient POV to do this though?) However, George R. R. Martin uses the character-exposition method, and it works for his purpose because his perspectives are unreliable. In other words, Martin doesn't want single objective truths about his world; he wants the reader to come up with their own truths. It rather depends on what you want, or think best serves your story, I think. And Martin's POV is 3rd limited, though a distant third limited, IIRC. I don't think you can have an unreliable narrator in omniscient POV. And I'm still wondering how best to deliver world information in 3rd limited POV if you don't want the narrator(s) to be unreliable and you also don't want characters to deliver exposition dialogue/thoughts. Anyone got any ideas as to the answer? I'm sure it sometimes happens naturally through plot, but it seems like if you artificially create plot devices just to show something when your story doesn't need it for its external conflicts, clunky writing may result.

Anchor the worldbuilding details to the characters so that the audience won't feel like they're being lectured - just being let in on the little details of the characters' lives. It's never easy, and I make ample use of beta readers to make sure I'm being coherent, but the character-focus approach usually works for me.

I honestly would do as the previous people suggested. Just try to slip the details into the prose/dialogue. It doesn't have to be blatantly obvious, meaning you don't have to repeatedly beat your readers over the head with stick with it. Just keep your consistency.