Guest Post: Rote World-Building
For Fun and Profit (or At Least for Fun) by Jay Posey
One of the great joys of being a writer is
getting to create worlds that don’t exist (yet) and then letting others inhabit
your creation in a way that’s meaningful to them. Good world-building plays a critical role in
enabling your audience to enter your world and to stay firmly planted in it for
the duration of the tale. But there are
two sides to the world-building process, each with their own goals and needs,
and it’s important as an author to keep the distinction in mind while you’re
working.
On one
hand, there are the Author’s Needs, which mostly boil down to how much he or
she needs to know about the world to create a coherent and credible story
within it. On the other hand, there are the
Audience’s Needs, which require enough detail for readers to establish
consistent mental images of the world, to understand the significance of the
events that unfold, and, perhaps even more importantly, to have a solid understanding
of what’s possible within the world. How
much these two Needs overlap depends heavily on the story you’re trying to
tell.
From the
Author’s Needs standpoint, the amount of work the author has to do up front can depend on how different the created
world is from the real world. Something
along the lines of J. K. Rowling’s Harry
Potter series, for example, where it’s our world with magic in hidden
places, might enable a lot of the world-building effort to go into just what’s
changed and might not require a huge investment of time. If the setting is in a completely new world,
however, an author might have to create new geography, weather patterns,
languages, cultures, rules of physics … pretty much anything that could be
imagined.
But even if an author is writing a story
set in “today’s real world”, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no
world-building work to be done on the front end. That’s often where a great deal of research
comes in; mystery writers reading up on police procedures or forensic
techniques, or spy-thriller writers digging into history and foreign affairs,
for example.
Whatever the setting, an author needs to
develop an almost effortless familiarity with the world he or she is working
in. Working out the details ahead of
time before plunging into the narrative proper helps establish boundaries and
helps maintain consistency once characters and plot start getting thrown into
the mix. But just because all that work
has been done, doesn’t necessarily mean it all needs to show up in the story
itself.
The big
danger as an author is to think that everything you created has to end up
explicitly in the book. It’s all too
easy to forget about pacing and plot and fall into the “Look at this world I
built! Look how smart I am!” mode, where you overwhelm your readers with minor
characters’ family lineages and the origins of the thirty-two appropriate ways
to shake hands in your invented culture.
Ultimately, the audience only needs
to know things that are relevant to the current storyline, so they can
clearly picture what’s going on, they understand the significance of events as
they occur, and they have reasonable expectations of what can happen in your world.
When Luke Skywalker excitedly exclaims,
“You know of the rebellion against the galactic empire?!” to C-3PO, there was
no need for George Lucas to delve into the history of the fall of the Republic
and the rise of the Emperor at that time.
But we did need Obi-Wan to give us a quick tutorial in the ways of the
Force, so we didn’t freak out later on when he starts talking to Luke from
beyond the grave and helps him make the critical shot to destroy the Death Star
without the aid of his targeting computer (spoilers!). Similarly, we needed to understand what was
at stake if the Death Star wasn’t destroyed
(it’ll crush the Rebellion!), but we didn’t really need a full breakdown of how
the thing was constructed and how many Imperial credits it had cost to build.
Proper world-building helps your audience
understand the “rules” of your world so it’s not a shock when your heroine
saves the day by casting that fireball, or doesn’t seem like a cheap escape
when she jumps off a balcony and can suddenly fly. Your stories don’t have to be predictable, of
course, but they have to feel internally consistent to really have impact. If in the middle of your epic duel between
two medieval sword-masters, one of them suddenly drew a plasma pistol and
blasted a hole through the other, it would be a surprise twist, certainly, but
probably not in a good way.
Beyond those minimal goals of clarity and
consistency, how much of the world you reveal is partially a matter of personal
taste, but also depends on the audience you’re trying to reach; fans of hard
science-fiction might want to know the details of your faster-than-light
technology, while some readers of fantasy feel cheated if they don’t get a good
map or two.
Ultimately, authors need to do enough
world-building for themselves, outside the story, to gain effortless
familiarity with the world they’ve created.
How much of that work actually ends up explicitly detailed in the novel
(or novella or short story or whatever) is a more delicate matter that can
probably be summed up with “however much it takes to tell the story well.”
----------------------------
Jay Posey, April 2014
Comments
Post a Comment