World-Building in Fictional Stories

truepenny aka the author of the notable fantasy novel, and Hugo nominee, "The Goblin Emperor" has been blogging on her writing process in a series of posts. The latest, which is entitled Five Things I Know About Worldbuilding, I find to be rather interesting and quite helpful.

In case you missed the link, go HERE for her post "Five Things I Know About World Building".

Never tell your audience everything you know.

This goes back to both (1.) and (2.) You aren’t writing a textbook; there isn’t going to be a test. You don’t have to explain everything, and in fact you’re better off if you don’t.

Also, there should be a difference between everything you know and everything your viewpoint character knows. Unless you’re writing in omniscient (in which case you, sir or madam, are as mad as a fish2), you need to filter your information through the character. If she doesn’t know it, she can’t tell the reader about it. If she doesn’t think it’s important, she won’t tell the reader about it. If the version of the facts she’s been given is wrong …

This is a problem that I've seen in historical novels as well. Most recently in the novel "The Other Daughter", where the writer got distracted by the time period. It also happened in a friend's novel that I read several years back. It's why I'm not a fan of historicals, because the writer's often
forsake characterization for well, sharing their extensive research. Hint - if you prefer research to writing, don't write, hire yourself out as a professional researcher.

I hate researching. Doesn't mean I'm not good at it -- I am. And I'm fast, when I have to find the answer to something. But I hate it. Something I have in common with my father - he has no patience for it either, but is wickedly good at it. The man is an encyclopedia of information and can find things quickly - or he used to. Age has had its effects.

But it is also a problem with a lot of science fiction and fantasy novels. Various popular writers do it all the time and get away with it. So non-popular, beginning writers think they can do it too.

I had a creative writing professor once who cautioned us not to try world-building until we figured out characterization and plot mechanics. But I think truepenny really provides some good tips. One of which is to build the world through the point of view of the characters.

Omniscient science fiction novels rarely work for me. I prefer sci-fi that sticks to a point of view, one or several, doesn't matter. And builds the world through it. See for example what George Lucas does in Star Wars - the first three films, he builds his world through the eyes of Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa and to a degree Vader and C3PO and R2 D2. The next three films - he loses most of his audience, by building the world outside of a specific characters perspective. Instead of the characters being the focus, the world becomes the focus. Which is why various actors looked like they were walking through their roles. Liam Neeson and Natalie Portman in particular. Because the point of view was omniscient, not specific to any one character. Skip to Star Wars:The Force Awakens, in that film we go back to the original model - the point of view is the characters. We are in Rey and Finn's point of view and to a degree Kylo Ren's and BB8's. The switch to the character's perspective, brings the audience into the action. We care about the characters, so we also care about the world. While making the focus on the world, distances the audience from the action and characters - so we are no longer invested in the characters, and as a result don't care so much about the world.

Another way of looking at it - think of buying a house or an apartment. When you visit a house that has no one living in it. It's well just a bunch of rooms. But if there is someone in it - you see it in a different way. Houses that are inhabited often sell faster than empty houses, because we can see how the house is a home. A model home or house looks very different than a house that your friend or someone you know lives in. Or even a stranger. The house takes on the personalities of the people in it. As does the world that you are building - it takes on the characteristics of the people who inhabit it.

(no subject)

1. Commute was haphazard today. Started out the morning trapped in a train with a certifiable schizophrenic, either that or he was having a bad drug trip. He was talking to people who weren't there, and had split into three personalities. And at various points in his diatribe - stared at me. As if he were talking directly to me - from across the train. I ignored him, using my book as a shield, and various people who stood in front and around us. But he made me edgy, so edgy that I almost got off at the wrong stop, just to get away from him. It was the sort of crazy that borders on scary and dangerous, and makes me wish that our society handled mental health issues better than it does.

Around one - I had to skip across the city to catch a train to Jamaica from Penn Station. It's about a 20-25 minute walk from Grand Central. Depending on foot traffic. I can do it in 15 minutes, but not when I'm confronted with red lights and crowds of people. There were a lot people wandering about the city today. Did get an interesting tour of 38th Street, 40th Street, Sixth Avenue, Broadway, and 7th Avenue - as I zigzagged around various obstacles. People are odd in urban environments. They like to stand in the middle of sidewalks staring up at the sky. Down at their ipod. Street cleaners will leave trash cans in the middle of the sidewalk. Folks will stand in little groups and chit-chat as if they are standing on their front stoop. You also have protestors, homeless, and various beggers sitting along the sidewalks. And oh yes, bicycle delivery guys zooming down them. Luckily, NY City has banned hoverboards, so we don't have to do with those - quite yet. Strollers, skateboards, scooters, and wheeled luggage, on the other hand.

On the way home from Jamaica, we were stuck for an hour on the Long Island Rail Road, in a tunnel, just a few clicks away from East New York. My stop was about twenty minutes away, Atlantic Avenue Terminal. The people in front of me were joking about it.

"Yeah, sure, let's take the train home from school. That was your bright idea? So we could sit on a train in the tunnel for an hour."

2.) Read another one of truepenny's posts - this one entitled Should Cinderella Kiss the Prince. Which makes some interesting points about category romance and why certain tropes don't work outside the genre.

I remember when I wrote Doing Time on Planet Earth - that I was tempted to do a romance between the two main characters. And even considered bringing them together via a romance cliche - the old, sexual violence trope. But talked myself out of it. For precisely the reasons that truepenny states in her essay.

But the thing about conventional, category romance is that, when it’s imported out of its genre–where it’s part of the form, like it’s part of the form of a sonnet that it has 14 lines–is that it shuts down character development. That’s what happened to me in The Mirador and Corambis. I put my characters in a conventional romance, and they began to behave according to the conventions of the category romance rather than according to their personalities and situations.

It wasn't a friend who talked me out of it per se, so much as years of interacting on livejournal and critiquing with various others on my flist fanfic and romance conventions that don't work in stories.

I was awarded by making the choice I did -- which was not to put the lead characters in a romance, by various reader's reactions. Everyone from various co-workers to family members told me that they were relieved that my main characters did not become a romantic item or sleep together - because they'd grown so tired of that particular cliche. That always happened, and it was really cool that I went a different route.

To have put them in a romance would have gone against who they were as characters and been unrealistic. I've read a lot of romance novels in the best few years, and the contemporary ones annoy me the most - because they are so contrived. The historicals work better, weirdly, because the romance feels a little less contrived and is built up to in a more realistic and far less predictable manner. While the contemporaries seem to be mainly Cinderella Fantasies. Yes, Cinderella kisses the prince, even though it makes no sense why she would particularly in this day and age, and with all the other choices she has at her disposal. That was in part what was so ludicrious about 50 Shades of Grey, it made not sense that Anastasia would go for or stick with Christian Grey. She was acting like Jane Eyre or Tess from a Thomas Hardy novel, except, this wasn't the Victorian Age, it's the 21st Century. And to give Hary and Bronte credit - neither story ends well. Okay, not that well.

Granted, that's the trope and what contemporary romance readers want - the full-fledged Cinderella Fantasy. And I have to admit, I need that itch scratched from time to time. So who am I to judge.
But, truepenny is right, it does not fit outside that genre.

She also makes an interesting distinction between "urban fantasy" (a la Jim Butcher, Kim Harrison, Ilona Andrews, etc) and Urban Fantasy - Ellen Kushner, Chia Melville, Fritz Leiber, and Terry Pratchett. (I'd also include Neil Gaiman in that group.) One is fantasy about urban areas. The other is more...romantic in nature, and a broader blend of genres. I think one is more literary and the other a bit more pulpy or fun. But she's more diplomatic. I've read both. And like both, for different reasons. I tend to write more like the former, than the latter. I'm not romance novelist.
The conventions of romance don't tend to work for me as a writer. A reader, yes, but not as a writer.
Also, I don't like to write explicit sex scenes, which is sort of necessary in romance novels, at least at the moment. Like to read them, just not fond of writing them. What I like to read and like to write don't always coincide, weirdly enough.