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truepenny(I know, geekerific subject line. But I love the word praxis and there really just aren't enough opportunities to use it.)
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matociquala's brilliant post on setting, voice, and grounding caused me to start thinking about world-building, what it is, what it's for, and what I think about how it ought to be done (which, please notice is subjective as all get-out, ymmv, contents may shift in transit).
So what the heck is world-building, anyway?
As a concept in literary craft, world-building is an artifact of the sf/f genre (and I'm cavalierly lumping science fiction and fantasy together for the moment, although there are ways in which the world-building each genre requires is quite different). You can talk about world-building in Georgette Heyer's books and Gone With the Wind and any other book in which the setting is not supposed to be a faithful mimesis of the experience and expectations of the author's dominant culture. It's not about what the reader does and does not know--we can read Tom Jones and have an experience similar to the experience of reading a book with careful and extensive world-building, but that's not because that's what Fielding was doing. That's the baggage we bring to the text, not part of the text's intended functionality. Otoh, contemporary novels that deal with the experiences of minorities may have world-building, if the intended audience is the literary mainstream, i.e., not people to whom the customs and cosmology of the depicted society are natural and familiar.
I think about world-building in those cases because I have been trained as a sf/f reader and because it's a very useful concept to be able to extrapolate outwards. But world-building, in its fullest sense, belongs to texts which feature as part of their fundamental nature the building of worlds.
Although not, I think, books that are about the building of worlds. It would be nonsense to try to talk about world-building in The Republic or Utopia, although both those works are focused on the description of an entirely imaginary society. Utopia describes its imaginary society, but it does not build it.
So what on earth do I mean by that?
World-building, to my mind, is something that a text does AS WELL AS telling a story. In the interstices of telling a story. In the background, in the margins, in the odd shadowed corners. Which isn't to say that the narrative can't stop for a while and settle down to explaining things, as, for example, the narrative of The Left Hand of Darkness is wont to do. But the reason world-building is clever and difficult, and the reason that sf/f writers talk about it ad infinitum (the last three conventions I've been to, I've been on panels about world-building), is that it's there in service of the story, not for its own further aggrandizement. The world-building in The Left Hand of Darkness is part of the story. The world-building in (random example) C. J. Cherryh's Rider at the Gate isn't, although the story is predicated on the world-building, and so Cherryh's world-building is always backgrounded, always oblique. Not getting in the way, so that there are a whole host of marvellous things that you see only out of the corner of your eye.
Roger Ebert said about Return of the Jedi: "The camera in 'Jedi' slides casually past forms of life that would provide the centerpiece for lesser movies." And while goodness knows I wouldn't cite the Star Wars movies as a great example of profound and brilliant world-building, it is absolutely true that one of the things the first trilogy does exceptionally well (I didn't notice this happening much in The Phantom Menace and I have refused categorically to see Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith) is that sense of what you might call depth of weirdness. In The Empire Strikes Back, Our Heroes reach the cloud city of Bespin. Why is there a city in the clouds? How does it stay up there? We don't need to know, and so we aren't told. The important thing is whether Lando is going to betray Han, and that's what we focus on. But in the meantime, we're in a city in the clouds! Dude, most excellent!
And that's the kind of world-building I love. The kind that's built out of throwaway lines and marginalia. Because that's the kind of world-building, paradoxically by its very ellipticality, that can most convincingly create a sense of a secondary world as existing in four dimensions, as having heft and breadth and history.
Infodumps are authorial intrusion, because they mark a point where the author has decided there's something readers Need To Be Told. They can be camouflaged well, and they can certainly serve their narrative valiantly if done correctly (which may or may not involve camouflage). But world-building by minimalism (whatpapersky calls incluing) is what I strive for because it allows the story and the sheer brilliant joy of the world-building to co-exist.
And, of course, it makes sf/f look more like mainstream literature, because the plot doesn't stop dead for three pages while the Mad Scientist explains his Hyperdrone Frappinator to his Beautiful Daughter. Whether or not it's a good thing for sf/f to imitate mainstream literature is a question I actually don't have an answer to. I am certainly highly suspicious of mainstream literature's claim to be superior to all forms of genre fiction, and I would hate for sf/f to bind its feet in order to fit into mainstream literature's glass slippers. But at the same time, I also believe passionately in the supremacy of story, and I do think that story is better served by the inclue than the infodump.
Also, please note, that 'infodump' and 'exposition' arre not the same thing. Beginning writers are told that infodumps are a terrible sin, and this makes them afraid of exposition and description. But exposition is not infodump, and infodump is not exposition. The Left Hand of Darkness is again my shining example. There's lots of exposition in TLHoD, but no infodumping, and that is because the exposition is also the story. Because story is not the same as plot.
This is confusing, and I think I'm way out at the limits of what I have vocabulary to talk about. But in sf/f, the world is always part of the story, because the story couldn't happen if the world weren't the way it were. And that's why world-building is so important, and that's why it needs to be so carefully integrated into the story as a whole.
I've said elsewhere that it's a slight misnomer to describe sf/f as a genre (or genres), because what they really are is modes of storytelling defined by their setting. But what I've just explained to myself--and to any of y'all who are still with me--is the fact that, yes, they are a genre, because setting in sf/f isn't setting. It's world. And the world is part and parcel of the stories that are told and the manner of their telling. If you can transplant a science fiction or fantasy story into a mainstream setting, it isn't speculative fiction. That isn't to say it's a bad story, simply to say that the marker of the specfic genre is that the setting and the plot are codependent on each other.
And that is why sf writers spend so much time talking about world-building.
matociquala's brilliant post on setting, voice, and grounding caused me to start thinking about world-building, what it is, what it's for, and what I think about how it ought to be done (which, please notice is subjective as all get-out, ymmv, contents may shift in transit).So what the heck is world-building, anyway?
As a concept in literary craft, world-building is an artifact of the sf/f genre (and I'm cavalierly lumping science fiction and fantasy together for the moment, although there are ways in which the world-building each genre requires is quite different). You can talk about world-building in Georgette Heyer's books and Gone With the Wind and any other book in which the setting is not supposed to be a faithful mimesis of the experience and expectations of the author's dominant culture. It's not about what the reader does and does not know--we can read Tom Jones and have an experience similar to the experience of reading a book with careful and extensive world-building, but that's not because that's what Fielding was doing. That's the baggage we bring to the text, not part of the text's intended functionality. Otoh, contemporary novels that deal with the experiences of minorities may have world-building, if the intended audience is the literary mainstream, i.e., not people to whom the customs and cosmology of the depicted society are natural and familiar.
I think about world-building in those cases because I have been trained as a sf/f reader and because it's a very useful concept to be able to extrapolate outwards. But world-building, in its fullest sense, belongs to texts which feature as part of their fundamental nature the building of worlds.
Although not, I think, books that are about the building of worlds. It would be nonsense to try to talk about world-building in The Republic or Utopia, although both those works are focused on the description of an entirely imaginary society. Utopia describes its imaginary society, but it does not build it.
So what on earth do I mean by that?
World-building, to my mind, is something that a text does AS WELL AS telling a story. In the interstices of telling a story. In the background, in the margins, in the odd shadowed corners. Which isn't to say that the narrative can't stop for a while and settle down to explaining things, as, for example, the narrative of The Left Hand of Darkness is wont to do. But the reason world-building is clever and difficult, and the reason that sf/f writers talk about it ad infinitum (the last three conventions I've been to, I've been on panels about world-building), is that it's there in service of the story, not for its own further aggrandizement. The world-building in The Left Hand of Darkness is part of the story. The world-building in (random example) C. J. Cherryh's Rider at the Gate isn't, although the story is predicated on the world-building, and so Cherryh's world-building is always backgrounded, always oblique. Not getting in the way, so that there are a whole host of marvellous things that you see only out of the corner of your eye.
Roger Ebert said about Return of the Jedi: "The camera in 'Jedi' slides casually past forms of life that would provide the centerpiece for lesser movies." And while goodness knows I wouldn't cite the Star Wars movies as a great example of profound and brilliant world-building, it is absolutely true that one of the things the first trilogy does exceptionally well (I didn't notice this happening much in The Phantom Menace and I have refused categorically to see Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith) is that sense of what you might call depth of weirdness. In The Empire Strikes Back, Our Heroes reach the cloud city of Bespin. Why is there a city in the clouds? How does it stay up there? We don't need to know, and so we aren't told. The important thing is whether Lando is going to betray Han, and that's what we focus on. But in the meantime, we're in a city in the clouds! Dude, most excellent!
And that's the kind of world-building I love. The kind that's built out of throwaway lines and marginalia. Because that's the kind of world-building, paradoxically by its very ellipticality, that can most convincingly create a sense of a secondary world as existing in four dimensions, as having heft and breadth and history.
Infodumps are authorial intrusion, because they mark a point where the author has decided there's something readers Need To Be Told. They can be camouflaged well, and they can certainly serve their narrative valiantly if done correctly (which may or may not involve camouflage). But world-building by minimalism (what
papersky calls incluing) is what I strive for because it allows the story and the sheer brilliant joy of the world-building to co-exist.And, of course, it makes sf/f look more like mainstream literature, because the plot doesn't stop dead for three pages while the Mad Scientist explains his Hyperdrone Frappinator to his Beautiful Daughter. Whether or not it's a good thing for sf/f to imitate mainstream literature is a question I actually don't have an answer to. I am certainly highly suspicious of mainstream literature's claim to be superior to all forms of genre fiction, and I would hate for sf/f to bind its feet in order to fit into mainstream literature's glass slippers. But at the same time, I also believe passionately in the supremacy of story, and I do think that story is better served by the inclue than the infodump.
Also, please note, that 'infodump' and 'exposition' arre not the same thing. Beginning writers are told that infodumps are a terrible sin, and this makes them afraid of exposition and description. But exposition is not infodump, and infodump is not exposition. The Left Hand of Darkness is again my shining example. There's lots of exposition in TLHoD, but no infodumping, and that is because the exposition is also the story. Because story is not the same as plot.
This is confusing, and I think I'm way out at the limits of what I have vocabulary to talk about. But in sf/f, the world is always part of the story, because the story couldn't happen if the world weren't the way it were. And that's why world-building is so important, and that's why it needs to be so carefully integrated into the story as a whole.
I've said elsewhere that it's a slight misnomer to describe sf/f as a genre (or genres), because what they really are is modes of storytelling defined by their setting. But what I've just explained to myself--and to any of y'all who are still with me--is the fact that, yes, they are a genre, because setting in sf/f isn't setting. It's world. And the world is part and parcel of the stories that are told and the manner of their telling. If you can transplant a science fiction or fantasy story into a mainstream setting, it isn't speculative fiction. That isn't to say it's a bad story, simply to say that the marker of the specfic genre is that the setting and the plot are codependent on each other.
And that is why sf writers spend so much time talking about world-building.
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-19 04:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-19 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-19 06:03 pm (UTC)However, now you have to explain why world building demands in sf v f are different. I tend to lump them together for world building purposes (and I would call space opera a form of fantasy), although I think certain kinds of reality-based sf may approach plot and purpose differently than one would approach those things writing fantasy. But I'm very interesting to hear your take on it.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-19 06:27 pm (UTC)This is the same as backstory, really. The writer needs to know it but the reader doesn't. The problem with warning writers about how they put in the details of their world is it discourages us from putting in the details that make sci-fi/fantasy so cool. Or the details of backstory that make your character a real person.
Anyway, neat post.
M
no subject
Date: 2005-11-19 07:35 pm (UTC)I'm also fascinated by the implications you have, then, for distinguishing between fantasy and SF. Those boundaries only blur as time goes on, and I suspect that this may be a fresh, new perspective in a conversation in which so many horses have already been beaten to death.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-19 07:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-19 10:25 pm (UTC)Yes yes yes. This was one of things that (as I mentioned (http://www.livejournal.com/users/oursin/363840.html) in passing) I loved about Melusine - that indirection and implication and out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye oblique glance. It's the absolute opposite of that thing that
no subject
Date: 2005-11-20 04:20 am (UTC)I'd argue that any kind of fiction has to do a decent job of world-building in the sense of having a background in how things work--who brings in food, how the clothes get clean, who fixes things when they're broken, all the working details. The focus on which details matter might vary a lot, but anything set in a different time or culture but intended for "modern" writers also has to give readers a sense that, if they just turned their head, they'd see something new and convincing in that strange other world. In order for the fiction to work, we need the writer to build us a bridge from our real world into that fantastical other world. There's huge variety in where we are directed to look, the writers can be amazingly ingenious in how they hook us into the fiction, but they still have to ground it in things that remain tangible to us. The examples that leap to my mind are small objects like guns in 30's hardboiled American vs. locked-room British detectives like Christie; or the rustle of the clothes in Jane Austen vs. the beach-sandy pareus of the YA book Island of the Blue Dolphins.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-20 01:05 pm (UTC)I shall add this - and this passage in particular - to my memories, to quote when I get into discussions about why crime novels set in the very recent past are eligible for the Ellis Peters (Dagger award for historical crime novel): of course! It's all about world building.
Thank you for providing me with such a lucid expression of something I'd been groping towards.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-20 01:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-20 04:39 pm (UTC)Grounding, and the use of telling detail (which
no subject
Date: 2005-11-20 04:43 pm (UTC)Perhaps sometime I will rent the second trilogy and watch it with the sound off.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-20 06:33 pm (UTC)When I saw Sith I thought it would make an excellent silent movie (ideally keeping the music). I certainly enjoyed it a lot more the second time round, when I didn't need to pay any attention to the dialogue at all.
I love your engine oil/stones and cold water distinction; one of those things you read and go, "Yes!"
no subject
Date: 2005-11-21 08:47 pm (UTC)Next, can I also say that your appreciation for The Left Hand of Darkness shows in the final one-on-one journey in Melusine? I have actually been noticing the similarities, partly because I did very consciously have that same journey in mind--in the back of my mind, anyway--throughout the final one-on-one journey in The Winter Prince. Where your characters are stripped down to their defenseless selves and stuck with each other, and aware of each other in new and whole ways.
I really like your book.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-22 04:57 am (UTC)I hadn't consciously been thinking of The Left Hand of Darkness when I was writing that bit, but now that you say it, I can see Le Guin's influence. She does it better, of course, but following in her footsteps is not a bad place to be.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-22 11:57 am (UTC)I find this is true of lots of writers that I really admire. When I last re-read Tolkien (just before the films came out) I was stunned to see how much I'd unconsciously
liftedmade reference to in stuff I'd written.no subject
Date: 2006-01-24 09:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-11 09:21 pm (UTC)But there's absolutely no reason why that world can't be contemporary. Both Desmond Bagley and Dick Francis have written extensively - yes, they're thrillers, and set in the here-and-now, but they invite the reader into the world of geologists, jockeys, winetasters, stormchasers etc - things most people vaguely know exist, but don't understand, and they take you right inside so that you end up knowing _what it's like to be X_. I agree that most contemporary novels use the background as a shorthand to put readers on the same page - they say 'office' and expect you to visualise a bog standard installation, because it doesn't matter, but then, EFPs do the same, only in their case they're elven woods and village taverns.