World Building

First off, when you start thinking about actively integrating your world into your story you're approaching it the wrong way. When I create worlds, I create them as thoroughly as I can--down to history timelines, cultural differences, climate particulars. I want the world to be so complete that if someone asked me a question about it, I already know the answer. When you're writing in a new world, the world just needs to be. So when you drop information into your story, it's done the same way as we would do it now--an internal notation of what is going on. For example, let's day your world has purple grass and the trees only grow to a top height of six feet. Your character Bob is six foot four. "Bob walked through the woods, the treetops brushing against his cheek. When he stopped to eat lunch, he settled down against a sturdy elm. His black cloak cut a pie wedge of darkness through the purple grass and he admired it as he munched on his carrot."

Or whatever. That was a quick description. But you just mention it, establishing this as the norm for your world, and move on. You don't need to dwell on it because now the difference is firmly lodged in your reader's mind. Make sense?

Firstoff, I worldbuilding and secondoff I'm pretty bad at describing any of the world I've built and I've been working on remedying that.

So using your example of someone's height controlling the color of the grass, and I'll put it in 3PL which is a little cheating, let's say...

Bob stormed out of the office, screw it all anyway. The sun was bright, and the grass was purple, and he stood at a towering 6'4" today and somehow the world owed him something for all of that. Especially the grass. He would have rather been 6'5", but then the grass would have been puce instead of the lovely aubergine it was right now, and if Bob was anything, damnit, he was a giver.

Not the greatest writing, but the gist is there, I hope?

If you are interested in learning by example, check out one of Kim Harrison's novels. Ok, sure, the plots are not deep AT ALL, but the books are a fun, quick, light read, and I haven't noticed any infodumping despite the urban fantasy setting. Very cool.

Don't.

The wonder of Tolkien's works is that he doesn't explain any of his worldbuilding until you get past "Well, I'm back." He just expects you to keep up and figure out what's going on as he goes. If there's something important to explain, he'll give you only what you need to know.

Questions like "WTF is Tom Bombadil?" get answered 5 chapters later with "Bah, don't worry about it. You're never going to see him again." (But in british, which sounds so much cooler than my poor paraphrase).


The problem you're creating yourself here is the trap of having so much neat stuff in your head that you want to share it. Don't. Don't share any of it. Just let it come out. That's the only way to do this without infodumping and boring your audience.


I don't say "The sunset was a beautiful red and yellow today, because even though the sky's normally blue, when the sun's near the horizon the colors are different." I just say the sunset was a beautiful red and yellow. the audience will go ahead and associate sunsets with red and yellow, and not ask why.

Though the rest of your points are valid, this one is flawed...

dclary said:

I don't say "The sunset was a beautiful red and yellow today, because even though the sky's normally blue, when the sun's near the horizon the colors are different." I just say the sunset was a beautiful red and yellow. the audience will go ahead and associate sunsets with red and yellow, and not ask why.

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... because this is a naturally-occurring phenomenon. We're not talking about explaining stuff that happens day-to-day. That's like explaining water being wet and fire being hot. We're talking about things which make no sense, like eyes that glow and prehensile hair.

But the point is at least partially valid. We don't talk about why red and yellow sunsets are pretty because we understand how they're different than a normal blue sky. People from another world wouldn't explain their comments either, because the person their comments are adressed to would have the same knowledge. For them, it is "natural". So in one sense, it breaks character to explain a remark to the reader. Because that is not who is really being adressed. Depending on who the narrator is supposed to be, even they might break character by doing that.

On the other hand, it takes a lot of skill for a writer to keep a reader from feeling so lost they drop the story... and still have the characters act "naturally". Learning to hit the right balance is not a matter of facts and logic, but an intuitive thing. Tacit knowledge. There's no forumla or equation. You learn by practice.


See post below:

Remember that the story world is normal to the people in the story. If Bob can control the color of the grass due to his height, that's normal to him so he has no need to think about it or explain why under normal circumstances. If for example all of a sudden his ability stopped working, that's different. Something strange to him would cause him to think things through and would give a reason for something to be explained in the story.

So think about how you can convey something which is normal to the people in the story to readers who are unfamiliar with this world. Also, consider what needs to be conveyed in order to tell the story you want to tell. Not everything an author comes up with while world-building will show up in the final narrative.

Consider real world examples. You get up in the morning, get in your car, and drive to work. 99% of the time "drive to work" is a single operation which doesn't require thought. But what if the car doesn't start? That takes driving the car out of normality and into the realm of interest. How would you explain cars to someone who's never seen one? Would you need to explain, or is it more important that you got to work?

Let's say the character gets up in the morning, steps into the teleport machine, and ends up at work. 99% of the time, that's normal for him. A reader reading this automatically concludes "OK, this world has teleportation, the character doesn't think there's anything special about it, let's keep reading and see what he does now that he's at work". As long as the teleportation is simply a means to an end (getting the character to the right place), then a description of the mechanics of teleporation would just bog the story down.

Hope this helps!

dempsey said:

Though the rest of your points are valid, this one is flawed...



... because this is a naturally-occurring phenomenon. We're not talking about explaining stuff that happens day-to-day. That's like explaining water being wet and fire being hot. We're talking about things which make no sense, like eyes that glow and prehensile hair.

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BUT... In YOUR WORLD... It *IS* a naturally occuring thing.

Zowie.

dclary said:

BUT... In YOUR WORLD... It *IS* a naturally occuring thing.

Zowie.

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Yes, but you can't simply leave the reader completely in the dark about everything simply because it's naturally occurring. Is what I'm trying to say. At some point they'll feel so without anchor they'll simply walk away.

dempsey said:

Yes, but you can't simply leave the reader completely in the dark about everything simply because it's naturally occurring. Is what I'm trying to say. At some point they'll feel so without anchor they'll simply walk away.

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`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
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Comparing nonsense children's rhymes to novels is comparing apples and oranges

Well, at least they're both fruits, I guess.

Actually I beg to differ. The point of dclary's post is that you can read the Jabberwocky poem and thoroughly understand its meaning perfectly despite it taking place in another world, with words we are not familiar with. I love this poem so much because I get a great sense of tone and the world in which this creature lives without anything being explained to me. I get it without Carroll having to tell me any context. I get that the Jubjub bird and Bandersnatch are dangerous without him needing to point out, "By the way these are my fictional creations and this is why they are scary".

Now yes, a poem is different from a novel, but this poem demonstrates how capable the reader is of creating a world in their minds without info dumping. The same quality of effortless world building should be in any novel, fantasy or otherwise. Personally I'd start off with a less is more approach, and if your beta readers are confused slowly integrate more and more detail. I make this suggestion considering most new fantasy authors do the complete opposite and there is a tendency for them to love the world they have created so much that they sacrifice story for pointless world building info dumps.

While you don't want to leave the reader completely in the dark, you do have to find a way of hinting at it without the dreaded 'infodump'

Incluing is an art in itself. And every time you come up against a thing you have to do it for it's hard. You don't have to explain why, or how. Explanations are boring. But you can hint. More often ( and more satisfyingly) you just have to state that it is there, and it is normal. But how to do that...there's the bugger Showing it in action, or people reacting to it ( OMG!!! A red sunset!!! It's a sign from the gods I tells ya! We're doomed. DOOOMED!) But more often you don't have to explain. Before ayone explained to you WHY sunsets are red, did you just accept that it is so? Betcha did. It just is. And if you show it as 'just is' in the right way, people will get it.

I wanted to add one more point about the Jabberwocky poem. Most any child can understand its meaning, whereas there are many fantasy novels that are so complicated in the detail of their world building that only the most persistent readers can get through it.

I find that in an effort to help the reader out, a fantasy author may write every little detailed description of an object or whathaveyou, but so much so that the reader literally has to put the puzzle together in his mind. Instead of being able to see the whole picture, the reader is forced to look at each individual component. Like looking at a close up photograph of a car, to look just at the locking mechanism, or the hood, or the door, or the exhaust, it's hard to put all those together in the right order to make the image of a car, especially if you've never seen one before, vs seeing it whole from a distance. Oddly the more you describe in some cases, the more work the reader has to do.

Exactly.

in DC Fontana's book "The Making of Star Trek" she talks about the show creators having many discussions about this. Kirk doesn't need to know HOW a handheld energy weapon can alternatively knock someone out or utterly disintegrate them into atoms. He just has to say "set phasers to stun."

Maybe he DOES know how it works. It doesn't matter. In neither case did they ever spend an iota of time trying to bolognium it up to the audience. Phasers just... phased.

IdiotsRUs said:

While you don't want to leave the reader completely in the dark, you do have to find a way of hinting at it without the dreaded 'infodump'

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This is the point I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to make.

I feel there's a knee-jerk reaction against explanation of even the subtlest degree that we (and I say we because I myself fall into this camp) under-explain things, which is also not right.

There's a balance you have to find, I think. And well, maybe we just write different and what do I know anyway, I'm unpublished still

For a superb example of incluing, read the first chapter of Heinlein's "Universe."

dempsey said:

I feel there's a knee-jerk reaction against explanation of even the subtlest degree that we (and I say we because I myself fall into this camp) under-explain things, which is also not right.

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While I don't think you're entirely wrong here, I do think there's an equal and opposite tendency to beware of -- the tendency to not trust your readers. And maybe a corrollary -- the tendency to assume that your readers are asking the same questions you are.

So using your example of eyes that glow and prehensile hair -- you have to wonder why people have glowing eyes and prehensile hair, because that will govern whose eyes you make glow and whose hair is prehensile. But your readers aren't going to stop reading to say, "why are her eyes glowing! tell me right now or I'm not reading another word!" They're going to be intrigued by the blue glowing eyes and file away the fact that eyes can glow in this universe, and wait for the clue that you, as a good writer, are going to give them in the near future. They don't need to be led by the hand; they'll infer your rules from the way you describe the people in your world.

So -- if someone's hair picks up a pencil and waves it around your story, your readers will accept that they have prehensile hair, that prehensile hair is something that exists in this book's universe. Eventually, if you reinforce it, your readers will notice that only the people with the blue glowing eyes have prehensile hair and the ones with pink glowing eyes don't. That way, you establish a rule without ever having anyone who should already know think about the rule or state the rule out loud.

Same with the eyes. If you tell me that the soft pink and blue glow from the XALIENRACENAMEX's eyes is the only light in the room, I'll know that XALIENRACENAMEX's have eyes that glow blue or pink. Again, that gets me a rule without any explanation or infodump.

I think this is just another instance where the best way to impart information is to show it rather than tell it. Once you know the rules of your world, you can drop clues throughout your opening pages or chapters or whatever that allow the reader to deduce or infer the rules.

Tangentially, I also think readers tend to retain information better when it's slowly spooled out to them. If they have to work a little for it and wonder a little about it, it sticks with them.

In High Fantasy, I always start off with languages. Each society needs a language to them. I use the languages to name the world, the cities, and the races themselves. (In an old novel, I wanted to call a race "The Lost" and it came out as Uruzak in their language, so that's what I called them. A very violent nomadic species.)

After I have names, now I can start maybe laying out how the continents look, what kingdoms there are, and where everyone lives. What history do they have together? What alliances? What enemies? After they have a planet, kingdoms, and history, it's time to drop a protagonist in there and see how he fares.

I always though language was the gear that held a High Fantasy world together.

My process is a little detailed, and requires several tools, but I've been very satisfied with the results.



First, I use a good 3D Terrain generator and tell it to generate an early-life-stage planet-sized map. I may render a few different ones until I see just what i'm looking for.

Then, I'll grab some of the open source genetic DNA mappers that are out there, and I work up a "first level" biology, I call it. microbes, ameobas, whatever. I try to stay small, with the first complex life forms being more plantish than animalish.

At this point, I rerender the terrain mapper with an erosion/platelet-shift mod I found. This helps show the tectonic redistribution of matter, may cause some extinction level events. It's all very exciting.

Now I'm ready for level two life. There's a cool tool called 'iVolution' that will take my microbe and early-generation dna files, and evolve them through billions of mutations in a pretty quick amount of time. It's only available on iPhone for now, which is a pain, but it does the trick fantastically, so it's worth the annoyance factor. This gives me my first "animals" -- usually they look like snails, or little fish, sometimes by this point I have land-based plants, which are getting much more complex, and early insects.

The USGS has some fantastic climate modelers, and I have one of them I use now for modelling climate. most of teh data comes right from the planetary file, so I only have to fudge a number here and there to really get the results I'm looking for. I can model rain and wind patterns, days of sun, UV exposure, everything.

Time for level 3 life. This one's trickier. I have to decide what types of life will initially succeed, and then I make them more complex, and larger. The species-war-2000 simulator takes care of the iterations for me, which sure helps.

This is a good time for a universal cataclysmic event. With that utlility AutoDesk put out a few years ago that simulates asteroid collisions, I can similate a meteor hitting my planet. This causes some plate shifts, usually creates more ocean space, and sometimes kills off a ton of lifeforms.

At this point, I'm usually ready to introduce sentient species into my world.

I try to establish 2-3 base races, and let them evolve into one or more subspecies of each other. Sometimes I'll have as many as 16 races, but most of my simulations show more than half of them being eliminated before they can even establish a stone age presence, which is a pain, because without any archaeological presence, there's no alien/monster artifacts for the surviving races to seek.

I use microsoft's empire generator to iterate each of the races through 10,000 years (or so) of history -- I've got my own name templates, which you totally need with that tool, as you know. this does a great job of tracking wars, bloodlines, feuds, just some wonderful things you can do with it.

I'll use a random calamity generator during the iteration to decide which race will randomly be snuffed out, and when. This race's buildings and effects become ruins and artifacts for characters from the other races to plunder.

This entire process takes me maybe 2-3 years to go all the way through, but I can't tell you how satisfying it is to me to have the finished product.

Right now I'm researching a tool that will randomly generate my characters for me that is plug-and-playable with the data file I've established.

I've done like, 8 of these worlds, and someday I'm going to write a novel about one of them. I think it'll be awesome.

dclary said:

I've done like, 8 of these worlds, and someday I'm going to write a novel about one of them. I think it'll be awesome.

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Put me down for a copy. I'll get Amazon to send it and have my assistant read it for me.

That's it, dclary wins the thread.