What stories do your characters tell each other about your world? Are there national legends and myths that stir characters to support a monarch or despise a principality? What moves tribal animosities?
I was reading Orlando Figes book The Story of Russia. He points out the importance of the stories Russians told about themselves and others, and how those stories and understandings shaped reactions to things. Whether outsiders agree with the stories doesn’t matter – it is inside Russian culture and politics that matters. So to with your worlds – their stories matter to them. So what are those stories?
Even if you don’t have a formal religion, you will still have myths and legends, heroes and villains, stories of “in the beginning” and tales that support social norms. Anne McCaffrey did with the Pern novels by folding in the story of Moreta (Dragonsinger) and others. You might just allude to those in passing, because everyone inside the story knows them, and the reader can suss them out, or just nod and go on. For example, in Called to the Council, Rigi Bernardi refers to a native teaching story. “I would not be as ‘The Leaper Who Looked’, sir” she informs a senior member of the ruling council. Everyone knows exactly what she means, and they nod and the discussion moves on. The reader doesn’t know, although given the basis of the story world, she can probably guess that something less-than-good happened to that animal.
If you are telling an our-world story, you have a lot of “real” cultural tales to draw from, and you can build even more. In your police procedural, the cops have in-house tales about “that one sergeant” who was either the perfect example (think the sergeant in Hill Street Blues) or the horrible warning. There might be stories about a criminal way-back-when who gave the police fits, but eventually they caught her. Shoot-outs with the Mob that get more exciting with every “generation.”
In an academic setting, you always have legendary professors and administrators. The formidable English Lit professor who inspired fear, loathing, and terror among the younger faculty, and who led one prof in a different department to write a tell-all novel. And the other prof doesn’t dare publish until English Lit prof dies.* Trust me, ten years after Super Prof retires, the legend will rival that of King Arthur and Modred, except with red pens and department budgets instead of legendary swords. And it will shape relations between different parts of the college.
If you create a religion, well, you have creation stories, probably, tales of the gods, morality stories, hymns and prayers, unofficial stories of the faith (see some Medieval saints’ lives books for ideas), and enhanced true stories. All of which are taken very seriously by your characters, or perhaps not. And they build your world, add depth and color, and give readers clues about the past and future if you use them carefully.
The key thing is that the characters believe the stories. Readers might know that, oh, St. Gerald wasn’t really a miracle worker, just a good civil engineer. 300 years or so later? He walked on the river, built the bridge overnight, and answers prayers**.
What stories shape your worlds?
Image Credit: Author Photo, Museum HIll, Santa Fe NM, 2023. The sculpture is an homage to a Mexican folk-art style.
*True story. Alas, Prof#2 died first, and we never got to read her book. SIGH.
**The priests of Godown insist that saints do NOT intervene in that way. Believers are not persuaded.
Mad Genius Club 
19 responses to “What Stories Shape Your World? – Alma T. C. Boykin”
[One teenage sister, commenting to another, about the non-existent monetary resources of the dying wizard guild in which they find themselves, after working with the steward:]
Cori chuckled. “What really worries Sanfelix are the expenses that can’t be covered, no matter what. The worst is the roof—that budget has its own name. Whenever there’s a tiny surplus, he says ‘Give it to Masescolan.’ You know, like the song.”
She started singing, quietly, and Viki joined her after the first line, with a giggle.
“And all the tears of all the maids,
They wept, oh, and they cried,
But they could not fill the endless pit,
Where Masescolan died.”
“That’s how bad it is,” Cori laughed softly. “They can’t not repair the roof, without causing damage to the whole building, but they can’t repair it, either. So they just shuffle little bits of money around as best they can, and put buckets under the holes they can’t do anything about, like Rush said.”
The Princess Seeks Her Fortune has gobs and gobs of fairy tales, often in tales that characters tell each other. At least those who are rude to the Ladies had due warning. . . .
Also in The Other Princess but less so.
Prof #2 should have left instructions in her will to publish the work posthumously. That would have set the cat among the canaries.
Jaiya setting: the backstory of how two factions of Avazata (evil shapeshifter thingies) fought with each other and spawned the Gnosha (insect-folk) and the trollfolk as their respective shock troops, only to have the shock troops rebel against them, comes up in a couple places. The Tree of Choices/Quantum Tree is important to the local religions’ account of the Creation and Fall, and we eventually see it in in person in book 4 of the Ancestors of Jaiya series. In that book, there’s also a kind of mythos that’s been building up around the hero’s now-deceased parents, who were involved in a notorious murder trial back in book 3. There are situations where he can use it to his advantage, but mostly it just exasperates him.
Star Master setting: The Great Abduction, which accounts for why there are psychic humans with some vaguely ancient Egyptian cultural flourishes in outer space. There’s also a bit of a propaganda war going on concerning the fall of the White Knights and the rise of the Red Knights, but as with the hero’s parents in the scenario above, it’s a story that’s begun within living memory.
Steampunk Monster Hunter WIP: the now-ancient fall of Atlantis/Numenor analogue is a core background element that people don’t talk a lot about in-setting. To the normies, it’s just an old weird story; to the distant descendants of the fugitives from the lost island, it’s the fish not noticing the water.
The previous manager in my department was petty, small-minded HELL on two legs. I worked for her for only a few months before she was gone (it was really several months, because she was out for medical reasons) and she had chilled out by that point so I only knew a strong-willed but fair old woman. But all my coworkers have story after story after story of her very impressive pissing matches with the heads of other departments, of how she would decide she hated one of her employees and hounded him or her until they could not take it any longer and quit, about how she played her employees against one another to maintain power over all of them, about how she would time her scathing remarks for 445 on a Friday afternoon so her target would have his weekend ruined before it even started. They will continue telling those stories–nay, those legends for years (and there are more stories about the ignorant geriatric who will retire soon, but his legend is more about his legendary stupidity).
In my series, my fictional island city-state (home to the main characters and setting for two of my three series) fought the CCP back from Hong Kong and made the little enclave independent. Wishful thinking on my part, indeed, but it fits my worldbuilding well enough (and also serves to make my little island haven a bit of a pariah among the bigger nations who still do business with communist China). My one character leaves the island to study abroad in the US and encounters– to her great surprise –that not everyone thinks of her island home as heroic.
The more I hear about college and academe, the more I feel like I should be very, very happy that I never did get a ‘higher’ education. I have to wonder how it even functions at all going by the stories I’ve been told.
At least in my areas of specialty, it runs because people were willing to be professional when it mattered. No one wanted the department to tank, and so the faculty et al acted like mature adults 99% of the time. Granted, I was at a small private college, then Flat State U, so I didn’t get the full experience of one of the Ivys or other Big League schools.
The Ivies are simply too well-endowed to fail.
The aboriginies still have legends of trees that walked and called down storms, of wings of shadows that drank souls, and the spiders that burned in the night, though nothing like that had ever been seen by the second wavers.
Though, something had made the five great rings go dark, not long after their completion, one by one descending into the depths of Jupiter’s atmosphere to be lost, until only the second of Sander’s Folly remained.
And even when that one was finally recolonized, nothing remained of the great planned cities or infrastructure they had been built with; just endless wilderness and scattered savage nomadic tribe who barely remembered what they had once been.
Shades of Babylon 5, generations later.
I have stranded dimensional travelers who unintentionally dropped into an ambush between armies, and having fought their way out of the trap, helped the other side win the battle. They were assumed by the locals to have been sent by God, and seeing that as a way to save their asses, went with it. A millennia later, “The Arrival” is still the major holiday, and their descendants still at the top of the dog pile.
My space story has a lot of places named for places on Earth– there’s been several waves of migration, and a ton of genetic engineering done, although language drift from now is pretty small exactly because it’s so easy to make and distribute copies. There’s slang, but they can understand our-modern English (and other stuff) just fine.
One of the main characters we follow is from…. well, in explaining the name to someone who recently got defrosted from two thousand years ago:
So, Jefferson was a state on Earth, some of the emptiest places on one of the less-inhabited continents-
https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/state_of_jefferson/
The Wizard Wars. In the world of The Last Solist, the Wizard Wars were bad. Imagine the Age of Strife but worse. Great if you want a MMORPG setting, terrible if you don’t want to be turned into parts for a sorcerer-warlord’s mad science project.
The only thing that most of the warlords would agree on was keeping the Darkness out of our universe (as letting it in would definitely lower property values in a whole Lovecraftian fire, death, and destruction of all reality sort of way).
Then, one day, a sorcerer-warlord by the name of Deus got pissed off and created the Magos, the Dawn Empire, and then won the Wizard Wars.
The Dawn Empire ruled for about…roughly 100,000 to 250,000 years, then something happened, there was a coup, and Captial vanished in a huge explosion.
You can find the wreckage today. It’s called the Gulf of Mexico (see! It wasn’t a meteor!).
After the disaster…the few survivors of the off-Earth colonies, and what was left of the Empire rebuilt the world. And the Magos wouldn’t allow for someone to ascend the throne of the Dawn Empire and rule.
Because two heirs of Deus still exist.
I started inventing a whole school culture for a book I wanted to write that I would/will call The Science Fair Murders. I had stories about the plays the school put on because of its history and a fight song. But my principal at the time realized that the principal in the book was going over the balcony and she got a little worried. The whole project went on the back burner.
My current WIP is going to include a bunch of true stories about meteorite falls in Iowa plus one fake. At least I’m not offending anyone yet.
I’m also working out, vaguely, the history of how knights came to receive magical powers. No one knows when it first began because it was originally just making you more powerful in the standard ways.
Everyone knows the first women, though. They had a monster that flew, and they needed lighter people to climb to its nest.
And various kinds of powers have historical origins.
There’s a bit in one of David Brin’s books, set a few hundred years in the future. A team of Our Heroes has just finished an arduous task. One says, “Okay, it’s Miller Time!” His buddy says, “You know, I’ve always wondered what that means.”
giggle
Though you have to be careful with those. I particularly like the Vixen War Bride series because when a character makes a 20th century pop culture reference, he explains he had done a paper on something across history, and this particular one was relevant.
One of my characters is quite old, she’s got lots of stories. As it happens, I just released a novella the other day wherein she relates such a tale.
https://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.com/2023/08/new-book-from-phantom.html (This is a link to my blog instead of a link to Amazon, I have learned my lesson about Amazon links. ~:D)
This is part of that exercise Sarah proposed some weeks ago, to write a short-story or two in between the novels, fleshing out characters ahead of time and feeding the algorithm a bit.
This one also contains the story of two swords that show up later in the series, the Sun katana and the moon wakizashi. A demon gets beheaded in one hit, so this is an Easter egg for that surprising event.
Other characters have stories, one of the recurring ones is Alice and chopping the zombie’s head off with a shovel. I chose to let that one remain apocryphal, relating instead the hinted-at story of Alice constantly getting arrested, and later losing her favorite machete. That one is coming out this week, I finally bit down on the cover thing and just went for it.
But talking about stories that flesh things out, we must mention Tolkien. Much of the charm of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are those legends and old tales he puts in. The Tale of Beren and Luthien is my favorite.
In my setting of Dracoheim, which is a magical city similar to 1950s LA, there isn’t any television, but radio is very popular, and one of the biggest radio dramas is called “Days Of The Founders”. It takes place in the early days of the city, when human beings first came to this world, and I’ve managed to sneak in a fair amount of the history of the world in conversations where people talk about the latest episode. Although, I also figure it’s written to be exciting and as such is about as historically accurate as Gunsmoke or The Virginian.