truepenny | Five Things I Know about World-Building (Reply)

[first published on Storytellers Unplugged, August 29, 2007; thanks to the Wayback Machine for helping me rescue it]

1. The more fun you have, the more fun your audience will have.

World-building should be fun. That’s what it’s for. You don’t have to approach it like a history textbook with all the dates and the names and the dry tedious facts. You only have to talk about the good bits, and you get to decide what those good bits are. And you can be outrageous. Real history is.

2. Never world-build through infodump.¹

(N.b., there is a difference between an “infodump” and “exposition.” Robin McKinley world-builds through exposition at the beginning of Spindle’s End; Diana Wynne Jones world-builds through exposition at the beginning of Howl’s Moving Castle. These are both markedly different from the infodump world-building at the beginning of the book I’m reading right now, James White’s Ambulance Ship.)

Avoid giving your readers information in solid lumps. This causes skimming and skipping, and if there’s something important in there, odds are pretty good no one’s going to catch it because their eyes have glazed over. Also, it feels fake; the dream ceases to be continuous and the reader gets dumped out of the story on his or her ass.

3. You can work it all out in advance or make it up as you go along. The end result will look the same.

How do I know this is true? Because 80% of my world-building, I make up as I go along. I take copious notes so as not to contradict myself or invent the wheel twice, but I invent my worlds on the fly.

Writing is, thank goodness, not a performance art. The finished product does not have to tell you anything about the details of the process. Therefore, the only wrong way to world-build–as with everything else–is the way that doesn’t work.

4. Never tell your audience everything you know.

This goes back to both (1.) and (2.) You aren’t writing a textbook; there isn’t going to be a test. You don’t have to explain everything, and in fact you’re better off if you don’t.

Also, there should be a difference between everything you know and everything your viewpoint character knows. Unless you’re writing in omniscient (in which case you, sir or madam, are as mad as a fish²), you need to filter your information through the character. If she doesn’t know it, she can’t tell the reader about it. If she doesn’t think it’s important, she won’t tell the reader about it. If the version of the facts she’s been given is wrong …

5. You have to let some details be throwaways.

This is what gives the world-building the illusion of depth. Not every folksong can be the coded solution to a mystery, and if you only mention popular culture or history when you are pushing another piece of the plot into place, your audience is going to get wise to your tricks, and your world-building is reduced to two-dimensional stage scenery.

Include details that have nothing to do with your story. Let your characters make allusions to events or ballads or novels that aren’t clues, just things they’ve read or heard or seen. The way real people do.

My favorite example from my own work (to be vulgarly conceited for a moment) is in the first chapter of Mélusine, when one of the protagonists says disparagingly of his teenage ambitions as a knife-fighter, “I thought I was quite something back then, like I was another Charlett Redding and they were going to have my hands plated with gold when I died” (p. 22).

That’s the only time Charlett Redding is ever mentioned, and that’s all we ever know about her. (I know more–although not a lot more–but like I said, never tell your audience everything you know.) Nothing about this throwaway anecdote has any bearing on the story, but it tells you a lot about the character and a lot about the world, and a lot of what it tells you, it tells you precisely because it’s a throwaway detail. It matters because it doesn’t matter.

And now, before I start calling people Grasshopper, I’m going to end this post.

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¹For a definition of “infodump,” plus any number of other useful concepts, please consult the Turkey City Lexicon.
²A statement which is not the same as saying you shouldn’t do it.