[write what you -have to- know, and/or: world-building (is not) for dummies]

[reenka]

I think being so well-versed in fanfic and coming back suddenly to tons of (well-done) epic fantasy books, it's really been brought home to me just how bloody hard world-building really is, at least for me, because I loathe thinking on group scale rather than about inviduals. It's funny, on some level, because that's what I used to do back when I wrote lots of high fantasy stuff from ages 16-20 or thereabouts-- largely ignore characterization (or just do it sloppily & off-the-cuff) and make stuff up about the world. See, but 'making stuff up' and creating society outlines and weird theologies and odd customs-- I can do that, but I don't think that's what (good) world-building is really about. World-building really rests on group characterization-- because the people largely determine the world. You can't have one without the other. Gah.

I've been turning a halfway-studious eye on Flewelling's 'Luck in the Shadows', and I think-- I think the difficult part is not to make up weirdass environments for the pretty characters to 'play' in, but to always think of the human reasons and the human consequences for every societal or magical thingamabob you come up with-- now that's really hard. It's like... a society, all its ills and benefits, comes from a historical basis, so in order to understand your 'central' society (made-up or just any that's not currently 'yours', time-wise), you have to understand its allies, bordering nations, and of course its enemies. Further, you have to have some idea of what social forces drive it (for subtly different 'issues' drive every society, much as they naturally have in common, depending on the people's ethnic background and the natural resources, etc). Lastly, you have to remember there is always internal as well as external conflict, and all societies have to be non-homogenous-- ie, either naturally diverse or unnaturally stifled.

This seems a task less for unbridled imagination and more just-- for very step-by-step, rigorously logical thinking, and imagining myself doing that sort of makes me a bit green around the gills. Basically, even if I don't have a cast of at least 50 in a high fantasy (or any other-world) novel, I'd have to keep many, many more characters (and groups!) than that in mind, all in the background motivating the say, modestly interconnected group of dozen people I actually write about. And if you're thinking 'just a dozen??' then realize I'm thinking 'OMG A DOZEN WOULD BE 6 TIMES THE AMOUNT OF PEOPLE I GENERALLY HOLD IN MY HEAD AT ANY ONE TIME'.
    In other words... I'm generally proud when I remember to put in something about Draco's dad in a fic. ^^;;; Although... to give myself -some- credit, I'd say that the more I write in a story-- in my latest H/D novella, anyway-- the more the characters naturally multiply without much volition; they just sort of seem to 'fit in' where there appears an 'empty spot' that suits that sort of person. So perhaps it's not all conscious logical step-by-step analysis. One can hope that sometimes it's a bit like a puzzle-- gets easier to 'see' the pieces the closer to done it is. And perhaps... perhaps societies are also built by something like a 'fractal' method, the way individuals are-- you start out with something small and simple & complexify outward according to certain basic directional 'arrows' you can follow. Or something. Though it's still really intimidating to look at the 'finished product', looking outward-in, rather than working outward from the inside. Le sigh.


It's not only people & groups interacting, though; years (decades! centuries!) of tiny little knotted threads of conflict and cooperation in human motivation create the tapestry of non-sentient aspects of a society as well-- like the laws, the philosophies, the architecture, the social hierarchy & power-structures; my god... even the language-use (slang) and the type of English you'd use for different sectors would have to shift. Even if this is just a foreign culture and not a made-up one, you have to know all this stuff, which seems about as effort-heavy as making it up (since it seems like if you know enough societies in this amount of depth, I suppose it's not so hard to mix-and-match and make stuff up).

Actually, this feeling of 'I have to know a lot more than I do' is why I feel sooo skittish about writing fanfic in any 'verse (or country!) I'm not naturally familiar with-- that isn't clear. I can't write any fic set in Japan (god no!) or Buffy's California 'cause I'm not familiar enough with it-- but I can write Harry's Wizarding Britain (loosely!) because a) it's not a coherent and densely worked-out enough of an 'other-world' and so has a larger-than-usual margin of error; b) I probably have studied Britain the most of any foreign country ever, so I feel I have at least 70% of the stuff I'd need to know if not in my head then easily acquired; c) any kind of school in any kind of society remains my 'home base'.

I think 80% of the reason I don't write other fandoms is that I'm so aware-- so aware-- that this isn't my culture (like, for either SGA, which I'm mostly unfamiliar with or Star Trek-- my most familiar sci-fi show-- I'd say military-science anything is just-- is totally alien to me even if I've watched similar shows before), and I feel totally lost.
    Like, I feel I could imitate the characters and predict their reactions in familiar-enough situations easily enough, but... the scope of any fic I write would be deeply limited (to basically talking heads in a room). It's like, I'd need to really study everything to do with Star Trek and answer any questions I'd have left to my own satisfaction and create graphs and charts and appendixes before I could write a 'serious' story in it. And I've read/watched a huge part of canon in this fandom already! I really don't know how people manage to write long, in-depth fanfics with adventure plots without huge amounts of research. Maybe they're just more technically-minded and/or have different experiences than me to prepare them.

Anyway, I'm pretty aghast at everything I'll have to do (ie, write 3 books of reference for every book I write) if/when I write other-world fantasy/sci-fi myself. And 'other-world' would include historical novels, future-Earth novels, and anything set in a foreign culture or even a foreign social circle in -this- one, to a lesser extent. To make all this more depressing is the fact that I'm not that interested in my own subculture (whatever that might be), at least on an inspiration level. I don't want to write 'what I know'-- like, college-age computer/fantasy/etc geeks in love?-- and I'm overwhelmed by the demands of writing what I don't know. Gah. And of course, of course I can't lower my own standards... so if/when I write an other-world novel, it'll have to hold together tightly or I'll just scrap it. -.-;;;
~~

It's no news to anyone that knows me, but...I really suck with people, man. Ack. I 'forget' to give the pizza-guy his tip and he says in this soft voice, 'next time, don't say you'll give a cash tip on the phone if you won't' and I'm like 'oh, gimme sec' and by the time I come back with the change (having left the door open!) he's gone! I even went outside after him in my thin shirt & pajama bottoms, but he was gone! GAH! So now I'm painfully, painfully guilty and I feel awful (it's the soft voice!!) and mourning my pizza, since now I won't have the guts to call them ever again -.-;; *facepalm* I'M SUCH A MOOOOROONNNNnnnn... ><;;; graaargh. Being softly chastised by a nice person is MUCH WORSE than being told off by an asshole. WAH.

Comments

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

Well, I do agree with you to an extent (ie, detail coming from characters), but, well-- that's a lot of characters (making up a society) and a lot of past characters (making up a history), and a lot of different threads of characters interacting (making my head spin trying to keep them all in the air). Like... the thing that intimidates me isn't the one character and their story, but the way that story intersects and interacts with like, at least 10 or maybe 20 other (minor) stories, and the way their grandparents stories have influences their stories, and the way their grandmother's uncle upset this one guy on a ship once and then 53 years later the vengeful thrice-removed cousin comes back to claim their honor except he gets waylaid on the market by a childhood friend of a mutual relation who was told to rob him to test his... (I dunno, but you see what I mean, right? complications!! inter-relationships! complicated histories making up a social group or an intersection of social groups within a larger group that makes up that segment of the overall society, etc!)

Anyway, this just seems very overwhelming to me personally, with my-- er-- limited comfort with group dynamics and also limited comfort when dealing with idea-based systems. 'Cause people's actions are also determined by their social/financial standing, nationality, religion, the overall climate of the country at the time, etc. But! Yes-- that's a great point about organic vs. cookie-cutter-structured social systems-- it's pretty easy to tell once you get the eye for it or think about it a bit, yeah. Ideally, though, there's probably some sort of balance between natural outgrowth and eventual structure-- because the society you're creating itself depends on both organic growth and imposed structures, and some things just logically follow as well (like, 'because the sewers are built in such-and-such a way, the house standing at this juncture of the city would have such-and-such situation with a secret passage going in this-or-that direction'). I think there'd be a lot of logical follow-through on organically conceived outlines in the most well-wrought worlds-- and it just sort of overwhelms me even thinking about it too much :>

Like, partly it's that I don't think some of these details would come naturally to me ('cause like, say, I don't know a lot about cows and their care, so if you asked me 'how do you kill a cow' or 'do did you upkeep roads before the Industrial age' or 'what are some different materials to use for paper'-- all this I'd need to even think of before I researched it, and it's just... a lot). But. It helps that there's intuition involved, definitely :>

[elfbystarlight.livejournal.com]

Being aware of the bits you don't know is really important! A lot of it can be cleared up with relatively little research - you don't have to know how to kill a cow, you just have to leave structural space for people to be killing cows if you want your character to have a steak dinner sometimes. Uunless the story depends on cow-killing, of course. Sometimes, it becomes very obvious that an author knows a lot in general and completely failed to consider one aspect - Tolkien's square mountains, bless him, or far too many fantasy authors who assume horses run a lot like cars (you get on, you tell it to go faster and it'll go all day until you tell it to stop, whereupon you put it in a stable and leave it there til the next journey three weeks later. Ahem.) and so on. Likewise, a lot of the small details will take care of themselves with about as much thought as you've given them - if they use paper, make sure they have access to the type of land that plant material is grown on, and show some kind if merchantile system so they can buy/trade for the damns stuff, but you don't need a treatise on papermaking though the ages.

And if you want to, there's the time-honoured process of finding a real (or historical) society that presumeably sorted all that out for themselves, doing a little research on it, and adapting that to your needs. :D In all honesty, especially when you're writing fantasy, historical familiarity with specific cultures is far more likely to yield a plausible world than making it up wholesale. But you don't have to be very rigid - the Romans had sewers and flush toilets and underfloor heating, for exaple, so you can plausibly give those to any society of similar scientific understanding.

Then again, there *are* things you won't think of, no matter how you try, which is why it's good to run it by other readers before letting it out into the wild, so they can say things like 'but how does he pay for the housekeeper if he has no income for six months here?' and 'so if there's no organised school system, why it it taken for granted that everyone can do calculus?' etc, most of which can be cleared up with only a few lines if *you* know the mechanism behind them. Or, dragging a quote from the ever-brilliant scott_lynch on his upcoming novel:

The cool thing about *this* map is that I finally remembered to insert a canal with a series of locks, so that the poor people of Camorr would no longer ram their barges fruitlessly and fatally into a 60-foot waterfall when trying to haul stuff upriver. For I am a benevolent god. Mostly.

Would that have occured to me? Probably not. I don't know anything about canals. *Now* you can be sure I'll be paying attention to it [g]

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

I think most of it is just getting myself to think of things in terms of groups or systems at all-- I think once I got in the (somewhat less than terrifying but more than just irritating) habit, things would fall into place. I also think the 'things I don't know' often seem to amount to 95% of everything I need to know, since even in short stories, I barely ever start with an outline or even an idea of where I want to go beyond 'well, this is a nice place to start'. And then sometimes I do know where I'm going and that makes it completely pointless to go there, since I've already been there... so to speak. I'm a winner at being self-defeating, I guess :>

But yes, it probably does help to have 'advisors' and 'readers-over' and stuff. I think it's like, even if I research and know stuff about the society in some historical detail, it won't necessarily grant me comfortability in juggling all the different elements of 'how things work' in (smaller or larger-scale) societies-- to paraphrase sistermagpie above somewhat, I too don't feel like I know how my -own- 'world' really works, much as I know all sorts of facts about it. I think there's a certain... knack at seeing things from a systems-based group perspective-- sort of pulling back and taking the telescopic rather than microscopic view of things (is part of the difficulty). Otherwise you'd know lots of mechanics without knowing the rightful 'big-picture' view of the places to plug them in.

A 'human' example would be me reading Flewelling's second Nightrunners book and balking at having a chapter describing the two heroes' night in a whorehouse. I mean, I can see how it advances both their relationship and the plot in -retrospect-, but my mind would naturally shy away from writing something like that because of a heavy built-in preference not to have my main characters 'cheat' on one another, whether or not (ha!) they've yet started their actual relationship. I was actually sitting there fighting with myself, trying to take the 'telescopic' long-eye-view, but my instincts kept tripping me up and I just kept telling myself 'BUT THIS IS SO MEAN'. And it wasn't even angsty or graphic or anything; it's just an example as to how one would avoid thinking about things that aren't comfortable in terms of creating the right interactions to move things along. Maybe I should just disengage myself from the characters in question (my own, then!) as I write, but I don't think this writer did that herself, so... I'm just a wuss. But I'm still bitter about the whorehouse. Very childishly bitter-- and in a similar way, I just shy away from thinking about other necessary 'systems-building' stuff unless its totally theoretical and factual. I mean, it's all in the application, isn't it?

...Possibly this is just solved with practice, and I admit it -is- easier to manage to objectively write 'distasteful' things once I get in the spirit rather than passively reading them, -especially- 'in the spirit'. Anyway, I'm just trying to say that the barrier is really a type of thought or approach rather than handling information itself :>

[elfbystarlight.livejournal.com]

[nod] I think I see what you're saying. It is best to work within your own thought patterns, even if you push them a lot (which I advise on principle [g]). Something it might be worth considering is that just because you like reading, say, the Nightrunner books, it doesn't mean you have to write those kinds of books, where the worldbuilding is a major part of it. A lot of stories do focus a lot more on the characters than the surrounding world - you can leave an awful lot alluded to rather than explicit, which means you can live without the greater understanding of it. As you say, any random individual *won't* know an awful lot about things that are out of their frame of reference.

That's a really interesting point you have with that Nightrunner scene, by the way. I don't think it's ever occured to me to see that as cheating, emotionally or otherwise, on what S+A have/might have/will have. That for me wouldn't be an uncomfortable thing that nevertheless moves the plot along. Which makes me think that in most cases, you can probably find something that you *are* comfortable writing about that would have the same effect as a difficult scene.

(I do think writers should push themselves - but on the other hand, writing things you despise writing about rarely produces your best work. Possibly some kind of deconditioning process? :D)

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

I really do wonder about this! That stuff about not having to write it just 'cause I like it-- that really struck me, haha. The problem is probably that I naturally write stuff that alludes lots and has mountains of things hinted at (I'm a pro at hinting at stuff I don't mean to hint at), but-- I also totally agree one should stretch oneself! So I read Flewelling with a sort of consternation and a bit of aw, because even if I don't wanna write books -exactly- like that, I need some of that (organizing? systemizing?) medicine. Or something. Heh. I could never actually start thinking in a totally alien or rigidly structured way so that's not a danger, probably-- but it's hard to know how to approach changing my thinking just enough to allow my innate vision to solidify without losing the pleasure I get from doing what comes natural (ie, avoiding those icky groups & social systems by any means necessary!!) :D

I'm actually writing this to avoid reading more 'cause I'm still(!) disturbed after the whorehouse chapter, and I'm not sure why either. I was okay with the minor 'indiscretions' (heh) before, but as soon as S. admitted to himself he was in love, that's it-- emotional lock-down. I think a lot of it is just me being slightly resentful (even though I'm still understanding!) of what's basically his nature, and a lot of 'normal' guys' nature. I mean, Alec is the most 'traditional' sort and even he...! Hah. So that sort of freaked me out a bit too, but he's a sixteen year-old boy, I'm being too harsh (I know!) but. Actually, I'm just being a totally unforgivable romantic, going counter to the character's own form of romanticism and emotional make-up. I mean, obviously, for -Seregil-, there's no emotional import to whatever he does within the whorehouses, and -he- was even jealous where Alec wasn't, and I should applaud the realism and him remaining in-character, but. Since I've grown so attached to them, I get a little too wound up when they act in ways I disapprove of. Alas. Actually, I felt a sliver of that with the queens putting traitors' heads on spikes ('but that's not nice! they should have a revolution!!' ahahah).

I agree you can probably achieve the same effect through different methods, though. When I feel I'm just being stubborn or squeamish, and when I admire another writer's work a lot, it's hard to still say 'well, I don't need to change'. Which is probably good, if I can get over it being vaguely alarming, heh.