This weekend I found myself discussing world building and writing with visiting (duct tape) family.
One of them is an inveterate world builder. Which is kind of funny, because all the enormously talented young men I know who build words are detailed and sometimes obsessive world builders.
This is good and bad. It’s good because rich, detailed worlds are a joy. It is bad because there is a danger of getting lost in the chaff.
Anyway, this is when, suddenly, mid-conversation I burst out with “money for nothing and your worlds for free.” Which is not exactly true, needless to say. I mean, I write the books, proof them, pay for them to be proofed by someone who doesn’t typo like she breathes, and sometimes pay an editor when things are wonky. That’s work.
What I don’t do is sit down and write a detailed world, and system of magic, and what happens when you do x that might never happen in the novel. I could. But the characters get rather impatient and while it’s fun, it’s not paying work. I’ve considered doing it, in my copious spare time, only in case of untimely death and the two writing goons or their father having to continue my series. I probably should. I mean, if I die at 102, G-d willing with my hands on the keyboard, I’ll die with unfinished novels, and they might as well know how to finish them.
But here’s the thing, I don’t need to write them for me, just like you don’t need to write your best friend’s name, or the path between the grocery store and your house. (If older goon reads this, yeah, okay, you do, but that’s a you problem.)
My characters are my worlds are just…. there. And they usually announce themselves by someone weird (well, my character, so needless to say, right?) showing up in my head and saying “Oh, hai, can you tell my story? Only they’re not usually that polite, and usually just launch into narration.
I’ve been woken from sleep, disturbed in the shower (or stranger places) and left movie theaters in order to rifle the purse for the notebook and write down the opening sentence of SOMEONE’s story. I have notebooks with half finished novels in worlds you’ve never seen (or fully finished ones) because someone (coughs in “father of goons”) decided that going on vacation meant leaving my laptop behind.
I’ve tried the technique of “interviewing your character” and I got some characters really mad at me. “Okay…. WHY? If you need to know my favorite color, I’ll tell you. Can you stop fooling around and write the story already?” One sulked at me for six years because I wouldn’t stop interviewing him. Our relationship is still fraught.
And I literally get the details I need when I need them. And when it’s done, it all fits together and makes sense. (Except I sometimes scramble numbers, but to be honest this happens when I’m taking dictation int he real world too. Or you tell me 23 and I write 21. Besides the typos, the copyeditor is on record as saying she’s going to strangle me on ages and time periods between events changing. Again, I do that in the real world too.)
So, what is this strange thing?
I don’t know. I flatter myself that it’s my subconscious being super-duper inventive, and just giving me full worlds, characters and novels.
Look, it could be.
Or I could be a strangely tuned radio getting transmissions from…. somewhere. Grandma, who was of a different generation thought that is what it was, and got alarmed. When I was about six, she tested me to make sure I wasn’t getting voice-thoughts in my head from the dungeon dimensions. The tests were negative, so hey, there is that. Or of course, grandma’s tests weren’t well designed. (Sacrilege. Because I know for a fact grandma knew everything about everything, even if she’d never studied it.)
In either case, it’s the most embarrassing thing to explain, even at panels in cons. You try starting an answer to “how did you come up with this neat world/character” with “Well, you see, there was this voice in my head” and watch the entire audience take a step back, dragging their chairs with them.
It’s even more embarrassing when talking to non-science-fiction people. It’s best not to try. Just tell them how clever and cunning you are, and how carefully you built your world.
And it’s downright embarrassing to explain the whole thing to my fledglings. No, really. It’s like trying to teach your kids to do something that comes instinctively to you, like, well, walking or talking.
Here’s the thing: I actually do have the book knowledge. When my first series (the thing soon — probably next year — to come out as the No Man series, which will make everyone hate me, and besides is unspeakably weird) failed to sell, I thought I was doing it wrong, so I studied really hard, on how to edit and “package” it. So I have encyclopedic knowledge from the theory side.
And I do use it. Oh, not for world building or character building but for TELLING THE STORY. Which is in fact my craft and what I get paid for.
Yes, the voices in my head — if you’re thus afflicted, it’s important to keep Pratchett in mind “Always remember which voice is yours.” — give me world and story, but most of them aren’t writers. (The ones who are are people like Shakespeare and Marlowe, and if I’m not writing iambic pentameter are sort of useless. Also, no, I don’t want to write the novels Marlowe would have written. Buckets of blood are not my thing.) So they don’t know how to tell their story so that readers will read it.
I get EVERYTHING. Including things I’d prefer my readers didn’t know for various reasons.
So, I shape the story given to me. This used to include when I was really young-in-writing pages and pages (and pages) of stuff that would never see the light of day. because yow no. I think both the Shakespeare trilogy and the magical British Empire have more deleted than kept.
But over time I learned to fast forward and zoom in on the next important narrative point, so I can write faster.
Heck, I used to write detailed outlines, because I thought I had to, but then wrote piles of pages outside the outline, because I didn’t know what else to do. (And the outlines were often too strangling because I was young and stupid. (Very.))
Eventually I decided to just embrace my identity as a pantser.
Yes, everyone sane tells me what I do is wrong. But if it’s wrong and it works, it’s not wrong.
Yeah, there are books I didn’t get for free. I do know how to write when everything inside my brain is dead and there’s only me limping along on knowledge and research. You surely don’t think I had an hankering to write a fictionalized romance about the life of Jane Seymour. As for the others that I was told to do and had to do by the numbers, I’m not going to tell you which. You don’t have a need to know.
Here’s the thing: Sometimes the worlds you were given die. (Usually through neglect.) And then if you want to continue the series, you have to do it by the numbers and knowledge. And then sometimes they come to life again.
And sometimes the worlds you created painstakingly from cardboard and spit and Dwight Swain’s instruction come to life, bewilderingly and just shine on.
You can’t predict a fey gift (What? You have a better explanation? No? Well, iz short hand. Could be G-d’s gift too, but I ain’t betting.) You can’t really control it. Not really. But you can shepherd and manage it. Somewhat.
And for that you still need knowledge.
As for what you tell fans at cons? I don’t know. Make up the most amusing answer you can think of. They like that.
*The featured image with this post is hereby released under CC-by. Have fun.
Mad Genius Club 
56 responses to “Money For Nothing And Your Worlds For Free- by Sarah A. Hoyt”
I’ve come to the conclusion that I am a check-pointer.
I know where I’m going.
I know what I need to do to get there.
I know what points I need to pass to get there.
It’s the wandering in between that becomes…interesting.
God knows I would like to just get these ideas out of my head on a more organized basis, because it’s painful to keep them in there right now.
Oh, yeah. Try the character who only gives you a chapter at a time. (Growls in A Few Good Men)
There’s a reason why writers drink. It’s often the only way to dull the pain of these characters that want out…and don’t know how to get out.
I’m… since the goons moved away…. their father doesn’t drink. I refuse to drink alone. It’s sad.
Same here. I’ve seen the end results of drinking alone and I won’t do that.
Hopefully, we can get some of these breech-births out of our skull soon.
Oy. The drinking. Can’t. Will kill me. Also, makes the writing stop (so does some medications. Eh.).
Substitutions for those afflicted:
Music. I settled on metal and techno. It calms things down.
Physical exertion or exhaustion. Can’t think when the body is saying ‘NO. Just no.’
Cooking. Not the eating part, but cooking. I have interrupted meals to get down a thing before.
I’ve seen the end results of using alcohol as a coping mechanism. It’s never pretty. I don’t want to go down that path, myself.
I get characters in my mind as well as the “worlds they live in”.
They don’t talk to me and I sometimes wish they would.
IE I know them and their worlds, but I find it very hard to put them in a story. So I sometimes wish they’d tell me their stories/adventures. 😉
Not all of them are articulate. I have a few that are really bad with words. And almost all of them are bad with emotions. Either that or they know if they start slobbering and crying all over me, I run away.
I write because I’m irked [The Elect, The Wolves and the Ice Lion], because no one else has done it [the Merchant books], to vent [A Cat Among Dragons], and because I needed a brain break [turned into an 11 book series. Oops]. If I don’t tell stories one way or another, they leak. That’s not good.
Where do they come from? From books, videos, the Muse, who knows. I don’t like poking around back there. It’s a scary place at times.
Yeah, alot of my stories come from “irritants” (in the oyster sense) of one kind or another.
If I don’t tell stories I turn everything into a story. And that’s not a good look.
This. So much this.
Yeah. Keeps one out of trouble, it does.
Mostly.
The only thing worse than the voices in your head, are when they all go quiet…
THAT’s when you know they’re up to no good.
If it works for you, keep it. If it doesn’t then set it aside and move on.
I was a math teacher for years. I love numbers and working with numbers. For example I just had my 71st birthday. 71 is a prime number. My birthday was May 29th. May is the fifth month. 5 is a prime number and so is 29. Who cares?
So when I run into a problem (see, I just used problem instead of say, situation) I always try to look at the numbers involved to find a solution. But finding an algorithm that describes the real world just doesn’t work.
But I enjoy life and don’t feel the need to solve (I did it again) the problems of the world any more.
You and my husband would have such strange conversations. This is how he thinks. (Degree in pure Math.)
I still get the giggles about the tall tale you spun about having a newsletter from a little old lady in … some town with a weird name that starts with a P that I can’t even get close to spelling… or something, the Idea of the Month club. 😀
Poughkeepsie I stole that from …. someone. One of the golden age writers.
THAT’S the word!
I have been to Poughkeepsie. More than once. Used to have a friend who lived there. So of course I used it once in a story.
Makes perfect sense.
IBM has had a major facility there since 1941. A search shows it’s still there, but has declined in size (just like IBM). And, yes, a great name and a beautiful area (I’ve been up and down 9W on the other side of the Hudson River multiple times – it’s a beautiful drive, although Poughkeepsie might not be beautiful).
It’s a town. Strip malls, grocery stores, houses, condos. Also a college.
I lived there for five years.
Ursula LeGuin had a speech (now bookified) “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”
I was once in an online discussion with someone who found the term “Poughkeepsie” magically suggestive. A town in Virginia with a name from a local tribe. . . my telling her about living there did not break the charm.
Harlan Ellison? For some reason I associate that with him, but I’m probably wrong.
I’ve heard it attributed to Frederik Pohl, but can’t verify right now.
I thought more like Pol Anderson….
Harlan Ellison was Schenectady for idea source. My bad.
At any rate, it’s been a joke at cons FOREVER. I can’t claim credit. I’d love to, but I can’t.
Barry Longyear once titled a short story collection “It Came From Schenectady”.
Ah, but you can take credit for telling the story well.
Which ties into writing.
You don’t have to be the first person to ever tell a story. You have to tell the story well enough to hit with your audience.
Harlan Ellison was the start. It was Schenectady, not Poughkeepsie.
Others developed it into the mail order firm in Schenectady, and the problem with the joke is that if you use to an audience of aspiring writers, they will ask you for the address.
I just get scenes, sometimes with emotion, and have to figure things out from there.
…. is fun, though, and I like most of the guys.
When you have more experience, they might self-assemble.
Thanks to your recommendation of techniques of a selling writer, I’ve gotten more strung together than ever before. 😀
It helped ME. Because it helped me figure out what was story and what wasn’t. It took me from unpublishable to regularly published.
It helps to set up dates, though.
I kinda enjoy world building, but I learned a long long time ago NOT to overdo it. Just tell ’em what they need to know and if there’s anything special, write it down in the series (or book) bible and move on. There’s no way I could have written a series like my portals one, where there are numerous different realities and the characters keep bopping around in them, if I tried to explain everything, or tried to work out every last detail.
The biggest thing I need to work on is ‘outlining’ a little better. I’m still very much a pantser, but when you’re planning a series, sometimes you need to at least make an attempt at signposts.
Oh, yeah. Took me the longest time to learn that. I mean they’re in my head, they’re fascinating. No, before telling someone to repair the spaceship, the character doesn’t need to give the reader a 100 page lecture on the history of his world. (Yes, I DID do that. Once.)
Eventually I decided to just embrace my identity as a pantser.
I’m the opposite here. I had to learn to embrace my identity as a planner. I was taught as a youngster that the only way you can be truly creative is to just sit down with paper and pencil, start writing, and see where it goes. Planned stories would inevitably be boring stories. But, while I’m probably too close to them to say if my planned stories are boring or not, I can say that they are completed stories; the ones I pantsed are still on the computer, somewhere between 2/3rds and 3/4ths done, and they’re never getting any farther.
But I did have some trouble, in learning to plan, in that all of the techniques I saw online wanted you to write these extensive descriptions of your characters and their motivations, and like Sarah, I just didn’t see the point. Neither did the characters: “You want to know what I want? I WANT YOU TO QUIT THIS POINTLESSNESS AND WRITE MY FREAKIN’ STORY! Was that clear enough for you?” Learning that, yes, I can take the parts of the planning that work for me and ditch the steps I don’t need, took a while.
Oh, no. You have to know the structure, before you tell stories others can read. I mean, I had the stories in my head, but they were unreadable, because I didn’t know what to put in and what to leave out.
Oh, and by the way:
This weekend I found myself discussing world building and writing with visiting (duct tape) family.
Does that mean that these are your “duct tape” family, the people that you do home repairs and play with duct tape with? Or does it mean that these are the family that thought they were here for a short visit but have been duct-taped to their chairs and will be staying a bit longer than planned?
Or do I not want to know….
Relatives I adopted by taping them onto the family tree. We’re not even sure where, but they’re definitely family.
I start with characters doing things and the world sort of self-assembles around them, but every once in a while I have to step back and consciously figure out how they’re paying for things, and what sort of police force in going to get involved when the MC finally loses patience and kills the annoying twit. And by the way, how did you get to work this morning?
the problem with worldbuilding too much is sometimes you spend so much time writing all the little notes for worldbuilding that you forget the whole ‘write the story’ part.
The thing is, if you overdo it, opposing forces keep things fundamentally stable.
You have to leave room for the characters and story to influence things in a meaningful way.
was a time when I didn’t have a clue what the characters were thinking until I finished the plot. Then I could look back and work it out.
This the third time I’ve heard someone use this song title for something this month. Clearly many people are on the same mental wavelength, and I am not one of them.
I did a spoof of this song decades ago for Agricultural Federal Grant, because, it just begged to be done. Yes, this is all useless information.
I had a weird dream last night:
In a steampunk world, dozens of powerful people possess the Parts of some mysterious ancient machine. Having those Parts is the main reason they’re powerful, and losing your Part all but guarantees your ignominious downfall. Naturally, they’re all paranoid, with good reason.
Now the world faces a civilization-ending catastrophe which will spare no one, not even the most powerful, leaving only a few miserable survivors among the ruins. The only way to avert that is to reassemble the machine — but of course the Part holders don’t trust each other, or anybody else. Plus, if some nefarious character gets control of the machine and misuses it, the results will be even worse than the looming catastrophe. That’s why it was taken apart, ages ago.
I don’t have a story or any characters to go with it, though.
Yes you do have the story in essence. The problem is you don’t have characters.
I sympathize. It took me over a decade, maybe two, to move from a story equivalently vague and characterless to Through A Mirror, Darkly.
The character is the henchman of the most powerful part older, who is trying to herd cats, and avert the looming catastrophe. Make him a Vimes-like righteous man despite himself.
Go write.
I get this. Initially, I was a massive overbuilder. World maps, town maps, languages, cultures, drawings of characters… Whole three-ring binders stuffed with a world’s weight of detail.
But all those years ago, I was new, and teaching myself to write fiction was hard, and I have a crap memory anyway, so having all that stuff in a binder where I could find it (and the map on the wall where I could see it) was, back then, genuinely helpful.
Over time, I got more confident of my ability to be consistent in how I presented my characters and my worlds, and I lightened up.
I can always understand building a world at the start of project — and if you’re new to the process of writing fantasy or SF, I think doing some light worldbuilding is genuinely useful.
Also, if you’re writing a plot that hinges on special rules in special situations, and you’re going to have a lot of those situations, having a little lexicon of How Shit Works can save your ass.
But in the current project, if I do something that I KNOW is gonna come back to haunt me if I don’t make a note… well, I have a little notebook in which I write down “How this thing works”.
It’s all on the fly, it isn’t planned out ahead, and it doesn’t eat into my writing time. Because you’re absolutely right. You need to keep your focus on the work you can get paid for, and not the shit that eats your time and cannot ever pay you.
Those little ad hoc notes are freeing. They take a minute or two at most.
And I have them if I need them… like knee-pads when you’re roller skating. Once you actually know how to skate, when you’re out there you know you’ve probably got this, but because you DO have gravel tattoos on both knees — (yes, I do) — those knee pads are a light, simple, unobtrusive backup.
I don’t know. I flatter myself that it’s my subconscious being super-duper inventive, and just giving me full worlds, characters and novels.
Look, it could be.
I think of it like translation. Writing is translating thought-stuff into words. Because the stories don’t quite come in words always. Sometimes it’s all the colors of emotion, raw and ragged and leaking.
I used to worldbuild to kill time. To get to sleep. Until it got so involved I stopped sleeping. That was bad.
Now I try to avoid it wherever possible. It is also possible that these worlds are chasing me. That would explains some things.