I’m very interested in world-building. Unfortunately, I’m not very good at it. The consistency required for in-depth culture, economics, language, et cetera, of a good story is still somewhat beyond my skills, so I’m working on improving.
While I’m doing an interstate move. The best possible time to learn a new skill, of course.
Okay, so maybe I’m not going to become a world expert on world-building any time soon, but it’s worth looking at the subject occasionally. And in the meantime, I write more historical fiction, which has its own world-building, as long as I’m willing to do the research to find it.
But I want to get back into writing fantasy, and to do it right this time. Please bow your heads in a moment of silence for the first two books of The Garia Cycle, which deserved to be written by a more skilled hand. Their sacrifice shall not be in vain.
Of course, not all the world-building can or even should make it into the final draft. I recently reread The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and I was struck anew at how much backstory didn’t actually make it into the narrative, and is left to the appendices or books like The Silmarillion. It’s a deep and rich world, and the stories hold up pretty well on their own, but most of the world-building stuff I know about Middle-Earth isn’t actually in the books, or is only mentioned as a name or place that you have to look up if you care to know more than what’s in the narrative.
That’s not a criticism, by the way; it makes the story more relatable. Normal people mention names, dates, events in passing; no one gives a ton of detail about those things unless they’re directly asked, they’re teaching, or, well, they’re one of us oddballs who go on hour long tangents because some poor innocent soul asked whether bees see the same colors as humans or do crocodiles have ears?
I’m sure I’m going to get protests- ‘Lord of the Rings is incredibly detailed!’- et cetera. It’s very descriptive, especially of the landscapes- I’d never really noticed how many color words Tolkien uses until this read-through- but if you consider the time scale involved, there’s a lot of gaps that you have to fill in yourself or look up. Events that happened three, six, ten thousand years ago are directly affecting the people of the narrative. A lot of stuff has to get lost in the shuffle or the books wouldn’t just be doorstoppers; they’d be the whole dang door.
The Hobbit was written as a children’s story, so there’s a ton of background that gets glossed over completely and details that are put in the story but never really explored- why are the trolls called William and Tom?- very English names, and not at all in keeping with what we normally think of as ‘Middle-Earth names’. My best guess is that Tolkien used those names in an initial draft, then liked how they made the trolls seem like outsiders- the ‘other’- in Middle-Earth, and kept them. Or given that the Middle-Earth legendarium is written as though it was a lost prehistoric English mythology, maybe he was commenting on how we modern people have lost all the good things in Middle-Earth and only kept the iffy things, like troll names. The real answer is probably that he explained the whole thing in one of his letters that I don’t have time to look up and read. The perils of doing research while under a time crunch.
Turning to another master in a completely different genre, the wisdom of Pat McManus was in his ability to let the audience fill in world-building gaps with their own imaginations. In his non-fiction advice on writing short humor pieces, he repeatedly returns to a bicycle that makes an appearance in one of his stories. It’s never really described except in its effects on young Pat- the front wheel comes off, flinging him over the handlebars; the chain eats his pant leg at the exact wrong moment, allowing the neighbor’s guard dog an afternoon snack of Pat’s leg while he tries to free himself from the chain- but audiences subconsciously fills in their own memories of their own childhood bikes, and they ‘see’ Pat’s bike as looking exactly like their own.
It’s a very practical approach to world-building: put exactly as much background and detail into the story as is needed to trigger the reader’s imagination, and they’ll do the rest. Any more than that, and it’s too much.
As always, the precise amount of world-building seems to vary with genre and personal style. Consistency is more important, and incidentally, it’s where I tend to fall short. Thank goodness for editing.
A task I’m not doing today, because I’m packing. By the time you read this, I should be in the new house but I’m probably sans internet for another day or so.
Which will give me more time and fewer distraction as I do the practical, real-life world-building known as unpacking and setting up a new house. Wish me luck!
Mad Genius Club 
11 responses to “Some Thoughts on World Building”
Good Luck!
On World building, I start small. Familiar things, the local environment and situation.
Maybe not something a reader has experienced first hand . . . but the tavern can have a crackling fire, a mug of ale . . . at that table over there “The King’s getting pretty old . . . ” the other table, to farmers grousing about the lack of snow in the mountains, “drought this summer if we don’t get a late storm . . . “
That gives you a civ level, season, and governmental form in a few words.
Or, Mom’s in the kitchen starting dinner, Dad’s picking up his younger siblings from soccer practice, and he’s sitting cross-legged on the tile floor of the living room, warm in the late afternoon sun slanting through the windows . . . practicing magic.
Oh! A Fantasy in current times! Now tell us about this kid . . .
Details can come later, if they’re important. Right at the start we don’t need the country, the kings name and who his heir is.
Something like that is enough, details can come after we get attached to the main Character . . .
William and Tom perhaps reflect that Tolkien was writing a “children’s story” and picked up some bad ideas from the genre. He observed that about the work, though not in this particular case.
That opening scene (or equivalent opening scenes further along in the story’s major location/personnel shifts/introductions) is overwhelming important. Not only does it have to convey some context grounding sense of place/time/civilization, but it’s also (usually) an introduction to one or more important characters in their context, and even if those particular characters in the scene are specimens, not the real players, they convey a flavor of what can be expected from the author in the initial vacuum. The reader wants reassurance that they’ve got the genre right, and that the author can be trusted to engage and entertain.
I suspect those few paragraphs are examined, re-written, and polished 10 times more by good authors than even the most heart-rending death scenes. And they should be — else the reader will never get the chance to read about those deaths. What do you care about Frodo fighting with Gollum in the volcano, if you don’t know who they are and what’s at stake? Without a good beginning, the climax can’t be reached.
If you’ve ever delved into Classical drama (Greeks, Romans) in its various manifestations (plays, epic poetry), you can see how useful the shared traditional mythology/stories are. The poet doesn’t have to explain them — everyone knows the stories — just riff off of them to explore/expound upon one traditional bit, the way one particular excerpt of “the matter of Greece”, as “the matter of Britain” or “the matter of France” carries so much medieval writing.
When we write Fantasy, we mostly have to do much more explanation (subliminal or explicit) to accomplish what those literatures started from. If we fail to do so, we end up with generic dragons, generic witches, alien beasties, etc., which have no automatic resonance (other than the nonce movies of our childhood which are themselves watered down). Tolkien took advantage of both the founding literatures (matter of Britain, etc.) and the need to set his own innovations into an equivalently solid foundation – and that is the heart of his mastery.
“You call that world building? This is world building!” 😀
As in, some of my characters have to literally build a world. Starting with a frozen rock-ball in the Kuiper Belt.
Heat it up, add water, create an atmosphere, raise the miniscule gravity to something more normal for us…
The focus of the world-building is also important. In Madeleine And The Mists, the king and his court mattered a lot. In A Diabolical Bargain, what mattered was the university, though there was a bit of bad blood in that a noblewoman had pulled rank to make sure something that should be done, was done.
A wise soul observed that Tolkien did a lot of world-building on languages because he liked languages. You should do what you want to do.
I got a review a couple months back claiming the world building in my first novel (2016) was “interesting but not convincing” so take what I have to say with a grain of salt….
I feel like world-building is ultimately conditioned by what’s interesting to the author and what’s necessary to the story (which is in turn influenced by what’s interesting to the author). Middle Earth grew out of Tolkien’s fascination with language and its origins on the one hand, and his need to tell stories to his children (and ultimately to other people, once the Hobbit was published and successful) on the other. You also see a surprising amount about wartime communications in Lord of the Rings possibly because he was a signals officer in WWI.
Basically authors start with what they already know about the story, and then extrapolate and elaborate from there.
The most important things are to know and understand how the world works. If you find yourself explaining it all to the reader, well, then you risk becoming David Weber ordering a pizza. (Which his devoted readers love, but if you are not already David Weber, that is a path best avoided.)
One of the best world builders was the mighty Poul Anderson, who would construct solar systems in his head for fun, and sometimes use them in stories. (He wrote one out in “A World Called Cleopatra”, which is essentially just an essay explaining the world, from its orbital distance from its sun down to its evolutionary history.) He wrote a very good short primer on avoiding the worst faux pas in world building called “On Thud and Blunder“.
Or, if you want an even shorter primer in a different medium, “The Shandifcation of Fallout” remains a classic, and only fifteen minutes long:
In short, you don’t have to be perfect, but it’s a Very Good Idea to have a grasp of how things work so you don’t jolt your reader out of the story by making them wonder “hey, if everybody is an adventurer, how the heck does anyone in this world eat?“
“How do they all eat?” That reminds me of the related question from anthropomorphic or other multi-species settings where you have a multitude of races, based on real-world animals. With many of the ‘people’ predators but seemingly no actual non-intelligent game animals or livestock, leaving you to wonder uneasily “Just who do they all eat?”
At least Beastars and Zootopia tried to answer that question.
See also: C.J. Cherryh’s Pride of Chanur series. She doesn’t beat the reader over the head with the world building, but it’s evident in all sorts of ways, including how evolutionary history influences how members of a species analyze things.
In a very different vein, I’ve published Eric Frank Russell’s The Great Explosion, a libertarian classic, but his monumental failure to understand the nature of money near the end of the story irked me so much that I included at least two appendixes explaining just how badly he got it wrong, and pointing out how his replacement system could never work. I still like the book (and love Russell in general), but man, that set off the economics nerd in me.