Worldbuilding
I don’t really have anything to blog about, but I feel like posting anyway and I’m tired of working. So this will be kind of a free-flowing stream of thought.
I only wrote 1381 words today, but that small word count required a considerable amount of work, as I finally tunneled my way out of a literary corner I had painted myself into. This happens a lot.
In SF (technically “Speculative Fiction, which refers mainly to science fiction and fantasy) writing, you have one thing that is different from other genres; it’s something called worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is the practice of creating an entirely fictional setting in which your story occurs; a setting where you, as Creator, have godlike powers to control everything from geography and societal structures to the very laws of physics themselves. Tolkien created Middle Earth. George Lucas created the Galactic Empire. Gene Roddenberry created the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire. Bob Kane created Gotham City.
Worldbuilding is both a SF writer’s greatest luxury, and greatest burden. Phenomenal cosmic powers; itty-bitty living space.
On one hand, you can do anything you want, without apology. If I want to make a world where demons rise up out of the ground every night, and can only be held at bay by magic symbols, you, the reader, have no choice but to accept that it is so and move on from there. It’s also great if you are a lazy researcher. You don’t have to make sure your characters are in proper period dress, or know real geography or science. Need your character to cure ED, but don’t want to research sildenafil citrate and find a way for your characters to create such a thing with medieval lab equipment? No problem! She’s got some boneroot (which I just made up) in her bag, and that will fix the poor guy right up.
On the other hand, you have to create EVERYTHING. In order to convince your reader, who has dutifully accepted demons, magic symbols, and boneroot, that they are reading about a REAL world that has depth and anima, you need to figure out how all those laws of nature you so casually changed affect everything else in the world. You need to invent cities and towns and hamlets. You need to imagine what the leadership and culture of these fictional places is like, especially in light of your changes to physics. How their economies work. How the people talk. How they settle conflicts with their neighbors. What their hopes and dreams are. Their religious beliefs and observances. You need to know if there is a real deity listening to their prayers and perhaps acting on them, or if it’s all just bullshit told to them by Holy Men and they’re just praying in the dark to an uncaring universe.
In the long run, it’s probably easier to do the damn research and write a period story.
Sometimes, the story is moving along fine, and then you suddenly run right off the map. Even the best worldbuilder leaves gaps, places just sketched like a matte painted background on a movie set to give the appearance of a larger world. When you stumble onto one of these gaps, it is both a problem and an opportunity. You have to switch gears and draw the ground underneath your characters, and then expand out, creating flora and fauna and people and places and things for your characters to interact with. It’s a pain in the ass, but it’s fun, too. It’s a chance to make this new place the COOLEST PLACE EVER.
The problem lies when your newly created coolest place ever, crafted so lovingly, no longer fits the plot you wrote before it was created. Suddenly, you are at point C, and the characters need to get to point E, but point D is suddenly a K.
What follows is a desperate scramble to juggle all your sub-plots and character development plans and long term goals to make the story run again. Sometimes it results in a brief stall, and other times, you really need to take a long break and step back, looking at the story, spanning several books, as a whole, and make MASSIVE adjustments.
I just spent the last few weeks doing that, and I gotta say, it is mentally exhausting, even if I am (very) pleased with the results. The story grows with the telling.
No wonder so many people choose to write nonfiction or historical fiction.
Food for thought, courtesy of Warren Ellis:
“Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.
Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfill their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.
Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.”
Warren Ellis is probably my favorite comic writer in the world, so I’m not looking to knock him, but it’s kind of a cop-out for a guy that works predominantly in the comics medium to say that.
Leaving aside all the worldbuilding he obviously did to create the Bleed or the Snowflake Universe in Planetary, the comic writer still has the advantage of having an artist do all that detailed exploration for him. All Ellis needs to write is “Jakita Wagner breaks into the secret base of the Four” and then he can sit back and let the amazingly talented John Cassaday imagine that base and draw it in meticulous detail. Without that art, Ellis’ story would be flat and flavorless.
That said, I am a big believer in the iceberg theory of worldbuilding, meaning that the reader should only see the tip that breaks above the water (i.e. the part that affects the ship they’re on), and not the other 90% of the ice which is hidden beneath the waves.
But to make that TIP convincing, a good writer needs to think about the iceberg as a whole a great deal.
I read Planetary. Ellis’ story *is* flat and flavorless.
I’m not saying I agree or disagree with his opinion… I’m just throwing it out there for discussion. I think we’re probably on the same page as far as your iceberg theory.
I think there’s a value in throwing something out there and leaving the explanation to the reader’s imagination; it can make for a more convincing and enveloping world than explaining the what and why of everything. Like the immersion method of learning a language.
I just read “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy. It could easily have been bogged down with a lot of backstory about how the world turned into a post-apocalyptic wasteland and details about what had happened since; the nerd in me kinda wanted to hear about that. Because he left almost all that stuff out, though, he was able to focus on what mattered: the story of the relationship between the two main characters. That was the engine that pulled the narrative train.
Anyway, because I just read that book, it was on my mind when I saw your post.
Planetary is the best comic ever made, or if not, damn close to it. I weep for Myke’s inability to appreciate it’s awesomeness.
I would like to point out something that may not jive entirely with other people’s impression of “worldbuilding”. That is, I consider creating characters part of worldbuilding. Maybe not main characters, as the world is built for their benefit, and the benefit of their story, but all the minor characters they encounter along the way. The gossipy bartender. The acolytes in the Holy House. The duke’s courtiers.
Regardless, I agree that worldbuilding should be inserted invisibly into prose, shown and not told whenever possible, and the occasional necessary infodump should be disguised as well as possible, that it might not appear as such to the casual observer.
But just because action and character drive a story, that does not excuse doing a slapdash job on the backdrop.
In spite of my earlier praise of plot and characters uber alles, I agree with basically everything you say about worldbuilding. The author has a ton of thinking to do… and the reader only needs to see a little of the result. The author has to give the reader enough of the world, and make it hang together elegantly enough, to make it worth any suspension of disbelief. But amen on the “invisibly inserted” and “infodump should be disguised”. The author must resist the urge to dive into meticulously well-thought-out but unnecessary backstory — but the reader usually shouldn’t end up feeling “this world has THAT and I hadn’t been told yet?!” halfway through the story. And the worldbuilding shouldn’t leave any huge apparent plot holes visible, i.e. “If evil wizards have such powerful spells, why haven’t they already enslaved everyone?” or “If there’s such a desperate shortage of high-quality weapons, why is the blacksmith poor?” I imagine that more often than not, the author who stumbles into these situations already knows the answer, but hasn’t yet had a convenient chance to sneak it in without infodumping.
Worldbuilding is a tough job to do well, and I have great respect for those who can pull it off. I had mentioned Alan Dean Foster earlier — I think he pulls off some great worldbuilding in his short stories.