World Building

frimble3 said:

If your character is only going to use one type of spell, that's all that needs to be explained. You can go into some detail, mention that there are other kinds of spells, but that this is the one your character uses: here's how it can go wrong, here's what it can do, but this is it. If we can't take down the BigBad with this, well, that's a whole other quest.

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I agree here. I think a lot of beginning writers get enchanted with the worldbuilding trip--it is a trip if you're a person of imagination. But stories must be tied to the concrete experience of a POV character (or characters), so the trick is to only include worldbuilding as experienced by the POV.

Ideally, I would say that the two should be intertwined. After all, if the plot isn't informed by the details that make your world different, what's the point?

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This is a great... point.

For myself, I tend to categorize SFF stories in two buckets: 1) worldbuilding-dependent, 2) worldbuilding-agnostic.

Some SFF stories feel like they could be transposed to another worldbuilding scenario entirely without affecting the character motivations and plot mechanics. These stories are actually world-agnostic--the world is not integrated into the story, but is only window-dressing. This is a perfectly enjoyable reading experience, btw--nothing wrong with it.

If a story falls apart without the worldbuilding, I think of it as worldbuilding-dependent. A great example is Ubik, by Philip K Dick. I won't give away any spoilers, but the mechanics of this plot (and the character motivations) can't exist outside the world Dick created. There is no generic, non-world-specific way to describe the plot mechanics, probably because it's a multiple-realities story.

For what it's worth, I tend to prefer worldbuilding-dependent stories. For me, they're usually stranger and more memorable than those which could be transposed to any historical period, setting, or genre. But that's just me.

Both Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were members of the Scriblings (an Oxford University group of writers) and they were very good friends who critiqued each other's books. But they were opposites, writing-wise. Tolkien held worldbuilding paramount. He did the worldbuilding before writing the stories; it was his hobby. Lewis wrote Narnia on the fly. He had no idea where the Chronicles would go. He started with one book, and built little by little off of that.

The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe introduced Narnia, but we didn't see much of it. In Prince Caspian, the reader discovers Narnia is part of a larger world that includes other countries (Telmar and Archenland). In The Voyage of he Dawn Treader, that world is larger yet, with a whole eastern ocean full of strange islands, a few other countries, and a magical wave into "Heaven." And on and on. Each book built on what came before. By book 7, the world was as rich and full as Tolkien's. But it wasn't planned like Tolkien's. Lewis left himself breathing room between each book. I prefer Lewis's method of creation, myself.

On my blog I wrote about Narnia all last summer.


If you've read all of the Chronicles in-depth, there's A LOT of worldbuilding that doesn't make sense though. The country of Telmar is created and abandoned, and its real location is up in the air. There is no mention of tundra or an arctic for the White Witch's polar bear fur and reindeer to come from. And there's the question of Mrs. Beaver's sewing machine -- if Narnia was a pastoral state, where did it come from? In Tolkien's world, everything was more precise and footnoted exactly.

I love both Tolkien and Lewis very much, but have more personal fondness for Narnia.

CathleenT said:

I've looked up nineteenth century recipes in Godey's Lady's Book and cooked them. I had to physically cover the ground that my protags would on the California trail, and while we were camping along the way, I even made a campfire using cow chips (buffalo chips not being available anymore). I've cooked over fires with tripods, ridden horses, and drove over some amazingly primitive roads. I couldn't wrap my head around the story until I did this. There's a reason I site most of my stories in California. It's the one part of the country I know very well.

Be advised that unless you've got better control than I have, when you're done your patient beta friends are going to have to hammer your manuscript because you're likely to end up with a fair amount of "I've done my research and you will pay." But at least you'll have a draft to cut.

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One of my favorite pieces of fiction is the long-running manga series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Each of the 8 parts takes place in a different time and place and there were a lot of little details that were, well, bizarre. It wasn't until I read the mangaka's book "Manga in Theory and Practice" did I learn just how much research went into this. He went to Italy, India, Singapore, Egypt, and all over America and took lots of notes and pictures for his references. Turns out pig toilets are a real thing! He was also amazed by just how big America was and just how flat the Midwest is. Yes, he infodumps about things sometimes (like how bartering works in the Middle East) but it fits with the style of his work. While the characters all look like their on steroids and they punch each other with their tulpas, the settings still feel real because of all the research he did, which I think is amazing.

I have definitely gone out of my way to do things for what is essentially throw-away lines of worldbuilding. When me and some friends went shooting, I asked to use a specific gun so I could know how it works, know the weight of it in your hands, where the little flange for the iron sights are...and this was for a fanfic! But guns are one of those things that anybody who knows anything about them will be taken out of the story when things are gotten wrong (Shadow the Hedgehog being an infamous example). A character in a show was shooting for funsies with a friend, with no ear protection, and just chatting casually with each other. Horses are another example, just look at pretty much any comic with them, the tack doesn't make sense half the time. So in-person research like that makes it more enjoyable for readers, even if they don't notice what you did.

A lot of the research, for me at least, is to get myself in the right headspace for the character/situation so I can determine what they would be feeling or thinking. That one very apocalyptic day in SF where the sky was red made me think of the disaster in my WIP; seeing people freak out on social media and feeling how the air was different and observing how people elsewhere in the world were reacting to it gave me a lot to think about. We knew why this happened, the area of affect, that this would go away, that we should wear N95 masks, but the people of my world wouldn't have any of that, it would be incredibly scary and they'd try to figure out what was happening. I ended up writing a lot about how it felt, how these fictional people would react and what explanations they would come up with it. Having that more complete "psychological profile" of a character makes it easier for me to write them.

Yes, language was Tolkien's thing. Meticulous detail went into that. As a reader, though, I didn't exactly sound it out. It *looked* good to my eyes, but I didn't hear it in my head. I fast-forwarded. Other readers might differ.

In Game of Thrones, I couldn't/can't get past Ned, Caitlin, and Jon as names for the characters, which, when contrasted with Sansa and Arya, just sounds and reads wrong.

CathleenT said:

I've looked up nineteenth century recipes in Godey's Lady's Book and cooked them. I had to physically cover the ground that my protags would on the California trail, and while we were camping along the way, I even made a campfire using cow chips (buffalo chips not being available anymore). I've cooked over fires with tripods, ridden horses, and drove over some amazingly primitive roads. I couldn't wrap my head around the story until I did this. There's a reason I site most of my stories in California. It's the one part of the country I know very well.

Be advised that unless you've got better control than I have, when you're done your patient beta friends are going to have to hammer your manuscript because you're likely to end up with a fair amount of "I've done my research and you will pay." But at least you'll have a draft to cut.

It would probably be a lot easier on you and everyone else if you didn't need to do a deep dive into your world. And you still might have to do it to get the job done.

I'm just throwing this out there in case you're like me. I usually need the world building to write the tale. I've got completed outlines that have world building weaknesses that I can't write yet, not until I work out a few more wrinkles. It happens. : )

ETA: On my to-do list for 2021: Learn how to build a fire using only flint and steel. And I might be working on some more herbal remedies as well.

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Cathleen--Sounds dreamy! In my non-creative writing day job, I'm a scholar of early American lit and spend a lot of time in the 19th c. A lot, as in it feels like a hundred years every semester! So much of the texture of a story comes from knowing what its author and original readers assumed about its contents without the author explaining. When Hawthorne tells us his protagonist is consuming a syllabub, we're supposed to know what one is and what the experience would be like, and then judge the protagonist for his frothy, saccharine delight in schadenfreude. Good luck with the fire starting--it's all the choice of tinder, if you ask me. Pine needles and cobwebs, or pocket lint in a pinch. Also, Godey's Lady's Book! I'm so grateful for online archives where I read what came before and after stories I teach, in their original site of publication. You rock! Delve on!

micahkolding said:

I see a lot of people recommending building a story before the world, and there is definitely wisdom in that. Ideally, I would say that the two should be intertwined. After all, if the plot isn't informed by the details that make your world different, what's the point?

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World-building can lead to story and story can lead to world-building, but I see a lot of authors who get so consumed by building an interesting world that they forget that it has to mean something. They wind up with a bunch of "isn't this cool?" that has nothing at all to do with the story they're telling. It doesn't matter and it never ties into the plot of the book. Why bring it up if it never means a thing?

clawyer80 said:

It's an easy trap to fall into and not even realize it. That's why it's important to have others read your work.

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The vast majority of world-building that you're going to do is never going to end up on the page. Far too many simply don't realize that.

That feels kinda putting the cart before the horse. You'd have to be really big for people to want to buy that sort of thing. They only put out a Guardians of Ga'Hoole compendium-type book after the main series was over, and it also took a few books for Eragon to get one, too, even though it already had a movie adaptation at that point.

The info should be stored in whatever medium works the best for you and your process. My stuff is across countless spreadsheets, documents, (microsoft) sticky notes, google keep notes...they're all at least in one ecosystem now (save for google keep) which is better than it used to be. And a telegram channel where I post pictures/links but that's mostly stuff like gems and bird feet and what various landscapes/birds look like.

I think it's more satisfying to put all the pieces together then to get them at once. Watching HBO The Watchmen was so enjoyable because of how the worldbuilding was dispensed. It had supplementary material that was on HBO's website that I poured over every week trying to put together why the world was the way it was, but the biggest pieces were in the show. Who Jeremy Irons is is painfully obvious if you've read the comic and the show doesn't explicitly tell you who he is until much later, but all the clues are there as to why that estate is so...weird. Why Jeremy Irons is doing all those weird things. Yes, we still do not know the identity of Lube Man, but that's not critical to understand and enjoy the story. We are told exactly what we need to know to understand how the "magic"/tech/world works (why Vietnam is a US state) and why characters do/can't do things (like why no one has smartphones). And we're told real-world things that the average viewer wouldn't know to appreciate the story (such as the Tulsa Race Massacre). It's been a year now since the show ended and I'm still thinking about it because the world was so well thought out and interesting, but at no point did it ever get in the way of the characters or the plot.

clawyer80 said:

I think part of the fun with the SciFi and Fantasy genres is how many take place in worlds that may be very different from the one in which we live. I think world building is very important for fantasy. In my own writing, the first novel, I completed was something like the Silmarilion in that it kinda set up a mythology/history for the world. It covered the beginning of the universe up until a turning point on the planet in question. All my subsequent stories take place on that planet after that turning point. If I can complete all the stories I have in mind, the last story will be about how the universe ends. Does anyone know if anyone has told the story of an entire universe from beginning to end through a series of books?

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The Narnia series kind of does this. It’s a pretty condensed universe, though, lasting only a few thousand years as far as I can tell, and lots of skipping chunks of time.

I find two major issues with world building. The first is that authors get too caught up in their world and forget to craft a good tale. The second is that the world has some idosyncracy that doesn't, to me, make sense. My latest example was a world that is entirely covered by water and the population lives under the sea in large cities enclosed in bubbles. The characters eat a hamburger. So where do the cows come from? What do they eat in their pastures? And why would people waste so much effort raising beef when there are far better ways to use the resources?

The corrolary is a fantasy novel where the magic makes no sense. People just do magic. If they just do the magic, with no cost in resources, why would they bother to do things like grow orchards? After all, you want an apple, just snap your fingers and you have one. And if you want a pie, why get the apples and bake the pie when you can just create one? Magic without consequences makes no sense. And no story.

Jeff

WeaselFire said:

My latest example was a world that is entirely covered by water and the population lives under the sea in large cities enclosed in bubbles. The characters eat a hamburger. So where do the cows come from? What do they eat in their pastures? And why would people waste so much effort raising beef when there are far better ways to use the resources?

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The answer is quite simple: Sea cows!And just like regular cows they graze on grass. I have no idea what a manatee burger would taste like, though.

ChaseJxyz said:

The answer is quite simple: Sea cows!And just like regular cows they graze on grass. I have no idea what a manatee burger would taste like, though.

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Where does the cheese come from, though? Also from manatees? Is it mana-cheese?

I've got a vague idea of the general scope and thrust of my setting, and things like individual species, characters and places are well established by extensive doodling, but most of the detail I just make up on the fly as I'm writing. That way I never feel constrained by the worldbuilding. If my timeline, method of FTL, or even broad subgenre needs to change to fit the story, it changes. I don't try to squeeze a good story into an intricately detailed timeline, although I might make one some day.