Got a biggish-sort of fictional world? A fat book (or 20 in a series) ? A complex setting? A whole buncha folks, in their multiple varieties and species and generations?

Well, good for you. Me, too. How do you hold the whole complex kit-and-kaboodle together, eh? And, since that’s the bare minimum required, how do you help your readers make sense of it all, both in the local story and in the overall creation in which it is embedded? After all, that’s supposed to be the whole point of the exercise.

Whether you’re off in deep space with aliens, playing with dimly seen druids, or simply adding to the breeding population in the Regency, the one place you often aren’t is the good old quotidian world you share with your readers, where casual references to conventional behaviors are understood by contemporaries, in-jokes are clear, and you don’t have to teach them that technology and culture are … complex … sometimes and might have unexpected consequences and drive surprising behaviors.

Well, it’s one thing to think that your readers who are familiar with (for example) fantasy conventions will be at home in your particular world, and that you don’t have to necessarily explain the local rules explicitly (and this is true for every genre), but still, you are the deity responsible for the world and its people, and you have to present it intelligibly to your readers so that they can properly understand the story that you’re telling, and what its events mean to its participants, how they will be able to plan their own actions themselves. How else will the readers be able to understand the story events or sympathize with the players?

So… the worlds and relationships you create had better be clear to you, and then made as clear as necessary to carry the story for your readers, else frustration alone will defeat their pleasure in your tale. Barring tedious prologues and long info-dumps, I find this takes two primary tasks.

The world must be as intelligible (predictable) to the readers as it is to the players, and the readers must be able to recognize and predict the possible behaviors of the players as well as the other players can, all without authorial lectures. And, thus, the further you are from the real contemporary world, whether by genre, species, timeframe, culture, technology, or what-have-you, the more you want clues that aren’t noticed as clues to do as much of the work as you can for the reader to aid in immersion, without explicit explanations.

I like to use “showing” as much as possible, letting the reader see players and situations and drawing their own conclusions about what’s normal (or not) in the story’s context. Second hand references in conversations, ruminations about problems, reactions from other characters, and so forth help hold all of that together, letting the reader play visiting anthropologist. The occasional clue in the form of discussions among the characters can do a lot to ground the motivations/constraints in the reader’s mind.

Similarly, reader observation of scenes that exhibit behavior clashes, oppositions, worries, planning, and so forth are also fruitful for reader understanding about the limits of the physical/political/psychological worlds the reader is exploring.

You don’t just have to hold things together for your created worlds, you have to make them adequately real (at least for story comprehension and prediction) for your readers without imposing upon them with raw info dumps.

What special techniques do you use, both for the intelligibility of your worlds and for reader grounding, so that they can slip into the story and remain embedded?

My toolkit includes a lot of basics (characters with distinctive names that are not easily confused with other character names, character clusters where in-group communications can clarify relationships and action constraints and disasters, and the occasional sense-a-wonder felt by a character to help convey that same thrill to the reader, so that he can sympathize more closely. The created world has to have integrity and sense, and the characters need to be intelligible enough (even as extreme alien entities) that at least theories of mind from the reader can chew on them.

What I’m not a fan of is the complete authorial “I’m not gonna explain anything at all about what’s going on and will make it as hard as I can to ground you in events and behaviors, because that’ll be more realistic.” Maybe so, but I have better things to do with my time. A little bit of that for local color goes a long way… I want to get going with the story, not the puzzle.

Where do you fall on that spectrum, as a reader? What do you do as a writer to give your readers a chance at bedding in to the story?