Worldbuilding part 2

Last time, I talked about worldbuilding techniques. Those are the ways authors build a world in the readers' minds--the world the characters live in. Every story requires worldbuilding, even if your story is set in an environment your readers know well.

The mistake a lot of unpublished authors make in worldbuilding is the "information dump." I don't know who invented that term, but it's the mistake of providing much more information than the story needs, especially to an audience who doesn't yet have reason to care about any of it.

My theory is, you can get away with any amount of exposition if the reader wants to read it. The trick is to make them want to read it. So whenever you're building your story's world, and you, through exposition, start telling readers all about the last five hundred years of chaos your world has gone through, please hesitate and ask yourself one question:

Why would my readers care about any of this?

This question is not rhetorical; it's essential. If you can provide a good, solid answer, keep writing that exposition! But if you can't...

Oh. Here's a bad answer to that question: "Because if they don't have this information, they'll never understand the implied threat of murder Vanessa's making in Chapter Six when she looks behind the mirror and talks about ghosts." The only time this answer is good, is if you're writing Chapter Six, and Vanessa just now looked behind the mirror and talked about ghosts.

What many beginning fiction writers don't get is, you don't want your reader to understand everything right away. Questions, remember? You want to raise questions in your readers' minds because questions make readers keep reading. If Vanessa's combination mirror move/ghost talk seems really out of place, readers are going to suspect they can't take her action at face value. That's when you tell the readers what her actions mean--right when they want to know the most. Or maybe in the very next scene, if stopping the action for an explanation would wreck the story's rhythm. But soon. Do it soon, or the reader will put stop reading and say "Nothing in this story makes any sense."

One other worldbuilding hint. I promised you a preview of one of the stories we're publishing in Issue #19. The story is our third place winner, The Gear Master's Wife, and we think it contains some of the best worldbuilding our magazine has ever received. The author, John Burridge, manages to mix questions with suggested answers in such a way that, even though we don't fully understand the world the story takes place in, we feel we understand enough. I want to draw special attention to one sentence in that story. The main character makes ice sculptures, and is making sculptures with religious meaning for his city's big holiday. Here's the sentence:

The next morning, the Guild of Bakers came to collect his ice statues for the Longnight Folly.

What kind of world names their biggest holiday "Longnight Folly"? The answer is, this story's world, which is cold, austere, and formal. So does everyone act stupid and foolish for a night on this holiday? No, it's a serious religious holiday. Yet in the context of the story, it works... even though you never really understand what the holiday's about or why it matters so.

So why would a guild of bakers come by to pick up the ice sculptures? I have no idea, but I bet the author does, and his confidence shines through in every description.

See, the story isn't really about the holiday or the guild of bakers. That's all background. The story is about a man who just suffered a terrible loss. The important thing is, he suffered it in this story's world, which is so stark and formal that readers can intuit the sculptor isn't going to get much help for his pain. This story's world doesn't have a lot of use for clumsy, awkward feelings. So, people in this world have a real problem when they're overcome with emotions too strong to contain. Since an act like crying or getting roaring drunk would be unthinkable here, the man's feelings escape him in a rather unorthodox way that causes a lot of trouble, and that is what the story is really about.

Every description and every action characters take hammer home the world's formality. Who cares why bakers collect the ice statues? It's interesting--it makes the world seem more real, because somebody (the author) put a lot of thought into that choice--but it's not important. What's important is what's shown in every line, and demonstrated in every description: this is not a place where you'll get comforted when you're sad.

So when you're building your characters' world, figure out what its most important element is, and focus on that. In The Zen Thing, the story I discussed last time, it was the bizarre relationships among deeply flawed people. In The Gear Master's Wife it's the world's coldness. What is it in your story's world?  

Worldbuilding

The term "Worldbuilding" dates at least back to the 1970s and refers to the work involved in creating a fictional world. When referring to prose ficiton, worldbuilding is all about giving fictional characters an interesting (to the reader, anyway) place to live. 

(Remember, the world has to be interesting to the reader, not necessarily to the story's characters. The purpose of writing fiction is to make readers, not characters, experience specific thoughts and feelings.)

Stories that are set in the real world require just as much worldbuilding as stories set in galaxies far, far away. The difference is, readers can generally be assumed to have a basic knowledge of the real world. 

That's not always true, though. At OTP we get a fair number of submissions from countries where life is rather different than it is in the US, or even the US and the UK and its related countries. For issue #19 we received, liked, but ultimately had to reject a story that couldn't be fully appreciated unless you knew a lot more about Serbian history than we do, and that we suspect our readers have.

A couple of times we've published stories by African authors, and we've had to ask them to be a little more explicit about what certain objects are, or whether it's going with custom or against custom for a character to do some act that, in the story, annoys neighbors. I'm sure some African readers probably wondered why the author bothered explaining something "everybody knows," but the point is, OTP is a global magazine and there's very little in this world that "everybody knows." (For one thing, all of our stories are written in English and only about 1/8 of the world's population can speak English. Reading it is a different question, and even harder to answer.) 

Even stories set in today's America and aimed at educated audiences in today's America require worldbuilding. Here's a good example from "The Zen Thing" by Emma Duffy, recently published in One Story magazine. Watch this combination of family history, characterization, mood setting, and scene setting. Anita is the story's main character and the setting is a family get-together.

[Frank] and Anita's grandmother are eighty years old. They met five years ago at Fresh Seafood, where Anita's grandmother worked as a cashier. They were both living in mobile homes at the time, but Frank's was a double-wide, and so they decided to move in there. Everyone is glad for it, especially Frank, who seems to have no family to his name whatsoever and will now, he knows, have his ass wiped by Anita's parents when the time comes. He has already asked Anita's mother, who is a nurse, to be his medical power of attorney. Everyone is pretty sure Frank is gay, and possibly black, though Anita's grandmother, having never had any experience with either, is unaware of this.

That's 100% worldbuilding. You can't understand this story until you understand the family and the world they're living in. In this case their world is one of unrealistic hopes, long-smoldering grudges, and nasty intrusions from the uglier parts of reality the characters intend to ignore for as long as possible.

Worldbuilding is much more difficult, though, when a story is not set in a world that shares most of its features with the one the audience lives in. When I was active on critters.org, I read a lot of unpublished (and unpublishable) SF/fantasy novels, or at least their opening chapters. I've seen authors desperately try to stuff six books' worth of notes about their world's history into the reader without once asking the question, "What must the reader know to fully understand my story?" The answer to that question is, "Much, much less than what you need to know to write your story."

In other words, we can read and enjoy The Hobbit without having to read The Silmarillion. (Good thing, too, if you ask me!) That's because the best writers figure out how to imply or suggest what readers need to grasp about a world without having to write "information dumps"--those heavy, leaden walls of text that previously speedy and nimble stories crash into and die from.

As an example, in the excerpt above, readers could not be expected to guess that Anita's grandmother has had no experience with gays or black people, so the story told them. Readers also couldn't be expected to guess that Frank may well be both gay and black, so the story told them. But now that you know these two things, and that Anita's grandmother and Frank have been living together for five years, what can you guess? See, that's the art of worldbuilding--giving the readers just enough pieces of the puzzle for them to assemble the rest. The finished picture in the reader's mind doesn't have to be exactly the same as the one in the writer's mind, just close enough to provide a useful framework for the rest of the story. 

Next week I'll give you a preview of a story we're publishing in Issue #19. That story does one of the best jobs of SF worldbuilding I've ever seen from an author who isn't already famous for writing great SF, and I'll go into some detail (with the author's permission) about how I think he does it.

Stories Must Acknowledge Readers' Obvious Questions

Imagine a story that takes place entirely in a bar, with friends drinking and talking. At one point in the story an empty beer glass flies off a table (by itself) and crashes through a window. Other than telling us the glass does that, the story never mentions the incident again, and no characters pay any attention to it.

So now imagine I call the story's author and say the beer glass scene doesn't work for me, because I want to know more about why the glass flew and why no one seemed to notice or care.

AUTHOR: I didn't explain the glass because I wanted to show, not tell, that this fictional world looks exactly like the real one but is different in a couple of ways.

ME: Okay, you did that. But why didn't anybody react?

AUTHOR: Because I wanted to show, not tell, that in this world, people are so used to seeing beer glasses fly around by themselves that they don't even notice it half the time.

ME: Would they react the same way if a vodka bottle flew around?

AUTHOR: Oh no. [Explains why beer glasses are the only objects that fly around.]

ME: That explanation makes sense. Here's the problem. I had to call you in order to learn it, and learning it makes me appreciate your story and your story's world a lot more than I did before. Your story has to give readers, in its text, the same appreciation you just gave me over the phone.

AUTHOR: But I don't want to interrupt my story for a three-page information dump.

ME: I don't want that either. I want you to acknowledge that readers are going to wonder why the beer glass moves on its own, and address that question in the story.

AUTHOR: There's no way to do that without the story being artificial. No character in this world would bother mentioning a flying beer glass. It would be like a character in the real world going outside in the rain and saying "Hey, look at this water falling from the sky," then explaining what weather is and what water is.

ME: What you described is the worst way to handle the problem. On the other hand, if your rain story's audience lived in a world where water had never fallen from the sky, you would have to address rain for that audience the same way I'm asking you to address the beer glass.

At this point, if the author were still reluctant to explain the flying glass, I'd ask the author to reconsider having one in the story at all. If this fictional world has flying beer glasses then it probably has other strange departures from the real world too, yet those aren't in the story. So why put in something that will just end up annoying the reader?

Here are two approaches to solving the problem.

1) A character says, "I hate when that happens. At least this one wasn't full." The next character says, "Do you complain about everything that happens every day? What are you going to yell at next, the sun for setting every night?" Or maybe, "That's what you get for not chaining it to the table," and have the character dangle the unused chain at whoever complained.

You could argue this conversion is a bit artificial. I'd argue all stories are, and must be, artificial, but that's another post. If you don't like the dialogue solution, try this one:

2) [Narration:] Most bars had switched to paper or Styrofoam cups to avoid the problem of flying beer glasses, but the Redrum Bar's owner thought the danger added atmosphere. He couldn't have been too wrong; the bar was packed every night.

You could argue the second approach is no good because it tells instead of shows, but I'm going to argue against that idea in my next post, next week. The point is, if readers are obviously going to wonder about something in your story, you're obligated to at least acknowledge the question. Whether you answer it is up to you.