General approach to worldbuilding

[velvetpage]

"Worldbuilding" is the act of creating a fantasy world in which to set a work of fiction. Some authors worldbuild for years, to the point where their world is extremely well-developed when they finally start writing the books that are going to be set in it. I believe Robert Jordan is one of these; Tolkien is another decent example.

Most authors, however, don't do that. They do something a lot simpler, but that requires more backstory later on. They choose a framework, usually a pre-existing one - say, generic medieval/renaissance sword-and-sorcery, recognizable in three-quarters of the fantasy fiction on the market - and then they build the individual details onto that framework. Instead of wizards, my world will have mind magic. Instead of the usual constant level of corruption, my world has such-and-such to keep the high-and-mighty honest. My world has dragons. My world has elves, only they're not called elves, they're called this other thing. My world has anthropomorphic characters. And so on, and so forth.

This kind of worldbuilding serves a valuable purpose. If the author is using a semi-generic framework, it means they can evoke that framework for the reader, who gets to use their prior experience with the same framework as a route into understanding the book. The semi-generic framework is triggered by certain details - names of weapons, styles of architecture, names of people or places, or landscape features (try writing a fantasy novel set in the high north without evoking either Vikings or Inuit or Russians! Go ahead, try it!) Sometimes this use of a framework is so deliberately historical that you can learn a lot about the framework being used by reading it (see Guy Gavriel Kay for an example of that.) Other times, the framework is loose at best.

The problem I see with this kind of worldbuilding is twofold. First, if the book/series actually succeeds, it invariably requires a lot of backfilling to make the setting rich enough to support the wealth of sequels that eventually get written. Anne MacCaffery and Mercedes Lackey have both experienced that problem over the course of their careers - the worlds in their later Pern and Valdemar series use the worlds in their first books more as guidelines than as canon. Dedicated fans can easily plague your life out wondering how such-and-such a detail in the first book is consistent with such-and-such a detail eight books later. However, any author who manages to get eight or more books out of one world, and have fans that dedicated, doesn't deserve my sympathy so much as my envy. No, the more common problem is the second: what is a good ratio of generic framework to new material? How much can you draw from history or other fantasy books before your book looks and feels exactly like six dozen others published in the last four decades? How little can you draw from those frameworks before your world becomes impenetrable and dense, too far "out there" for anyone to understand without a complex system of charts and maps that no one wants to keep flipping to while they read?

The goal is to achieve a balance, where your readers will be able to visualize the backdrop and understand the comparisons, but will still find your writing to be fresh and interesting.

Comments

[neebs.livejournal.com]

Your writing process fascinates me. You always seem so brilliant during these posts!

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Which is to say, I analyze stuff to death, then use my (admittedly pretty decent) grasp of persuasive writing to seem erudite about them. I'd be prepared to bet Stephen King has written stuff that was much more profound on this topic. The main difference there is that people actually read his. :)

[mairesue.livejournal.com]

What she said. You

are

brilliant.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I'm certainly not humble enough to completely deny that. At the very least, I love to believe it, whether or not it's true. :)

[rikoshi.livejournal.com]

This is something I think about a lot. I'm in the middle of writing my second novel within a world of my creation (one that I've written some side-stories in, as well), and I do often wonder just how certain details can and will all fit together (especially since I have many more ideas for novels that can take place in that world).

It is a tough balance to strike, I find. My own world is one that sort of resembles contemporary society, albeit peopled entirely by anthropomorphic animals, but as the stories get more textured, the differences between a story set in that world versus a story set in, say, San Francisco but happening to feature a bunch of furries, become more apparent (I hope!).

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I think one of the reasons the framework + added detail + more-details-as-books-pile-up method works is because the framework is only really necessary right near the beginning of the process. It's a hook on which to hang understanding, but hooks only really show up in the foyer - everything else can be furnished by the author, and as time goes on, the author can use their previous worldbuilding as the framework for continued expansion into the world, for example by adding additional countries around Valdemar. It's expected that, the deeper you get into your world, the more detail you will add and the more your world will differ from that original framework; in fact I'd argue that it's the authors who don't differentiate enough, whose books end up piling up in Chapters without ever selling much. The question then will be: was the buildup done by design, or did it happen when the author started writing a good scene, realized there was detail needed but hadn't written in yet, and just went with it off the cuff - sometimes called the "oh shit how does should this work" method of worldbuilding. :) I think you get a very different impression of worlds from authors who do it on purpose, than from authors who do it by accident, and those who do it on purpose are probably better authors overall.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

The most egregious example of ex post facto worldbuilding I can thing of is Gordon R. Dickson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_R._Dickson)'s Dragon Knight (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Knight) series.

The first book, The Dragon and the George (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon_and_The_George), was a 1976 expansion of a 1957 short story. It's set in about as generic a Fantasy England as you can get; the feudal trappings are really just a plug-and-play backdrop for the tale of timelost Jim Eckert, who suddenly finds himself inhabiting the body of a dragon. It was intended as a stand-alone, one-shot novel, and as such, was an enjoyable romp in the fantasy side of the aisle.

In 1990, The Dragon Knight (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon_Knight) revisited our hero, who had, at the end of the first novel, decided to remain in that alternate England of magic and dragons. Dickson, it seemed, realized that there were more stories to tell about "Baron" Eckert -- and that multi-volume fantasy sagas were the market's current cash cow.

As a result, a good chunk of The Dragon Knight is a high-bandwidth Infodump (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main.Infodump), filling in massive gaps and blanks about the political situation, the society, and just how magic works. It sets the ground for the later volumes in the series -- but, MAN, is it obvious.

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

In some ways I like divergent histories. You can play around with a lot of what ifs. I always liked the way that Hiazo Miyazaki creates these alternate late 19th Century to Early Twentieth Century alternate Europe. He can draw on a lot of historical detail to make the world feel solid, but he doesn't have to tell the viewer exactly how the world got that way. Another secret is to focus in on small set of events and the characters caught up in them. You don't have to delve into the deeper nature of the world until the sequels. I actually thought CJ Cheryh did this very well in her Chanur series. The world seemed like it was very much in development throughout the series, but you only saw it through the eyes of the main protaganist.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

For me, there is one big problem with divergent histories: I'm too lazy for them. They take a depth of research that I simply don't have the patience for. So I'm going to be choosing a very loose framework for my next setting, one that takes no more research than a few evenings alone with Wikipedia, and a few more alone with a notebook and a pen.

I find I write best when I can jump around between several main characters or groups of characters. I'm going to explore that a bit further in the next book, and worldbuild in such a way as to give me lots of little conflicts that all feed into one conflagration - which the main characters will have to solve.

[ghostwes.livejournal.com]

I only got as far as the second of Jordan's Wheel of Time books, but one of the reasons I stopped was that he just seemed to be making it all up as he went along, and not ably, I might add. I consider him an example of a poor worldbuilder, in fact, though I concede that maybe he got better at it as the series got into its 413th sequel.

Worldbuilding is much different in science fiction, I think. The tropes that work well thematically in fantasy do not really apply in sf. For example, there are no generic species to fall back on. There are, however, generic technologies (a la faster-than-light), but that doesn't help with the worldbuilding as much, in my experience. Also, there are vast differences between, say, near future sf and space opera, whereas much of fantasy stays within the same high fantasy conventions, sadly.

I'm always wary of authors that rely too heavily on infodumps. C.J. Cherryh is one of the worst for that: the first 10-20 pages of the novels of hers I've read are nothing but exposition. It's not even good exposition. Not sure what people see in her... her writing is quite awful IMHO.

I know a woman who does nothing but build fantasy worlds, and not for the purpose of writing books or playing games; she just does it because she enjoys the process. And it's amazing how much work she does... constructs multiple languages, maps, cultures, dress styles. She does a *lot* of work -- binders and binders full of it.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I never got into Jordan at all. I included him on that list because other people told me the books were extremely interconnected.

Maybe your friend and I should collaborate on a novel. :)

As for infodumps - if you can't manage to at least put your exposition into a conversation between a less-informed character and a more-informed one, or achieve some kind of witty first-person narrative to explain what's going on, you have no business cluttering up bookshelves.