[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

[cellia.livejournal.com]

I really don't know how people manage to write long, in-depth fanfics with adventure plots without huge amounts of research.

Many writers do do huge amounts of research. Some actually find this fun as it involves reading and learning.

[kattahj.livejournal.com]

I know what you're talking about - I started writing a fantasy story a couple of years ago, having planned the kind of things I usually plan for a fanfic, but I stopped after a couple of pages going, "No, wait, I have to figure out how this works first!" So then I started thinking about the world, the names of towns and countries, subcultures, marital customs, religion, different types of magic, technology... you name it. I'm still thinking.

I don't like the "let's do everything Tolkien did" crowd, but I'm starting to understand them.

[elfbystarlight.livejournal.com]

This is just my experience, but... most of that details *comes* from the characters, for me. I mean, the characters turn up as themselves and tell their story, and I'm left to wonder... okay, why did they do that? If they did that, then it must mean that this happened, and okay, if that was four hundred years ago then in the intervening time this must have happened, and he can't go to whereever because of this, and he was wearing this because... and it all builds on itself without deliberately constructing it. And you end up with all sorts of substories that you don't need to actually tell, because they're not related to the main story, but they broaden *your* understanding of things and that comes across.

In my experience, reading pro-fantasy, it's usually fairly easy to tell which worlds evolved organically and which were deliberately constructed, as the latter are usually a) simple b) boring and c) unbelieveable. (Caveat - to me, at least). The nightrunner books, for example - it seemed pretty clear to me, upon reading, that the world had percolated in the author's brain for some time and developed into more than just what was necessary for the story; and reading what she's later said about it, that's exactly what it did.

You do have to either be very organised or have a good memory. And make notes, because no matter how good your memory is, you'll forget something just when you need it. But I think that process is something that comes organically to a lot of people and is really hard to... fake, I guess, if it doesn't (though profic shows that a lot of people do approach it mechanically and they certainly sell well enough, so maybe some people prefer to read that kind of world?)

I know I'd be doing all that even if I never wrote anything down, because that's what my brain does. I can use it or not, make something of it or simply enjoy it as a kind of internal travelogue/soap opera (and heaven know I've done both before).

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

For anime/manga fanfic, I don't think you need to worry about Japanese social realism. Plz, most anime itself is nowhere near, and if you see how manga writers portray real places and time periods? They don't seem concerned at all.

BTW, if you're interested in writing fantasy, you might try checking out limyaael's essays/rants on worldbuilding. They're written from a writing perspective. She used to have a webpage, but I'm getting a MYSQL error on it...

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

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--

Word, word, a thousand times word. That, I think, is what makes the difference between authors like George R. R. Martin, who's Song of Ice and Fire series has economics and politics and religion and folklore built into its structure, and your average D&D rip-off fantasy. Worldbuilding writers like Martin and Tolkien are telling the reader a story about an entire world, while plot-driven writers like Rowling are telling a story about one or two people. For Tolkien, Middle Earth came first, and Frodo and Bilbo grew out of it. For Rowling, Harry comes first, and the Wizarding World is built around him. And if the reader is sufficiently interested in what's happening to Hary, then s/he isn't going to care that the Wizarding World appears to have no literature, or theater, or art other than portraiture, or international politics, and that the Death Eaters don't seem to have any motivation beyond being ev0l...

For fanfic writers, some of the worldbuilding work is already done for you (how much depends on the level of detail the original author built in), but when doing your own original work, you're pretty much starting from scratch. Even historical fiction, which, like fanfic, comes with it's own built in "canon," requires loads of research if you want to avoid being, say, Amanda Quick, who's "regency romances" bear so little resemblance to the actual 19th century that they might as well be set on the moon.

I do do some research for fic, but I freely admit to doing a half-asssed job of it (though I realise that what's "lazy, half-assed research" to a History major is probably "OMG way too much work for something I'm doing for fun" to a lot of other fans). I always have this feeling that I ought to be doing enough in-depth historical and sociological research to write a thesis on the background culture of my fic/novel/whatever, that I ought to understand the culture and the forces that shape all the chatacers and their society inside and out, but I usually just do enough to try and avoid making any obvious mistakes (like, say, having Dudley get a Playstation for his birthday in 1993).

In fandom, a little bit of research often goes a long way, especially when you're up against writers who apparently don't even bother to go as far as looking something up in Google. Some writers do put in a lot of research (and in historical fandoms like PotC, the presence or absence of it really shows), and some write the equivalent of a 1930s pulp film--anachronisms galore, and just enough period detail to seem exotic. A good writer can make either of the above work--a bad one has pages of mind-numbing infodumps, or settings that are so two-dimensional, they might as well be cardboard.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Oh, poor you with the pizza guy! I am cringing for you in sympathy! Ack!

Also word to everything else. I'm so intimidated by world-building also because I feel so retarded about life in general. I don't think I have the slightest idea how worlds really work-even my own! There are things I kind of get but I don't know how people come up with these complicated systems. I'm doing something now where I figure I really need to come up with this character's backstory in terms of his world and...that means coming up with a world and it makes me realize how claustrophobic the thing is now.

[mgsmurf.livejournal.com]

Here via metafandom.

Sure you're not the first person to be faced with the damn writing would be hard thoughts. My I have yet to finish a novel because I know with my writing style it'd take me 3 times longer to revise it into something that would hold together than to write, and I'm really not sure how able I'd be at holding that those details together while revising.

World building, I cast such a big picture brief eye on it, that I tend to only think up details if they're needed. As long as I know the how and why to the world's differences from now, I let the details flow as that logic would depict while writing, although then yes there'd be a slew of clean up with a novel afterwards instead of before. Also I write almost all science fiction. At least then I'm only extrapolating from now, and I know now, I'm living in it.

Lastly, isn't especially fantasy, but science fiction as well, about making up something completely different and altered than what anyone knows? If I wanted to write about my life I'd write mainstream fiction.

And good luck with that other-world novel whenever you do get around to writing it.

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

Here (belatedly) via metafandom. See, I don't find world-building that difficult in fanfic or original fic, and I love research (half my unread books were bought in secondhand shops because they might just be useful for researching a story *one day*).

I tend to start with a concept, and build from there, writing a bit, researching when I'm stuck, editing if my research (or my beta) tells me that what happened earlier doesn't mesh with how things are. Starting points for a world are things like 'what if Oxford was home to a bunch of extinct and mythical beasties, but most people ignored that?', 'what if Blakes 7 ran for 20 years, while Eastenders never happened?' 'what if New Aeon Books in Manchester had been run by Buffyverse characters instead of cavalorn and the gang?'. The question point and my initial main characters -- a bunch of dons and students, actors and their families, Lorne and Ethan in the respective examples -- shape the world, and the writing/research I need to do.

I must admit that I tend to write more when I've got people to bounce my ideas off -- my betas, my F'List, members of specific communities, people I actually talk to in the real world -- but I can't imagine writing anything without some kind of research, even if it's just rewatching specific episodes of a source medium, or snippets of a film scene that relates to the scene I'm trying to write. And my current WiP feels much more solid since I walked around Muswell Hill and Highgate and realised that those are two areas of London where my main characters live/lived at various points of their relationship.

Don't know if any of that helps, but I hope it does.