Tag: worldbuilding

On beginnings in speculative fiction

- Stacy 6 Comments

Reader reactions are so subjective. One person might think there’s not nearly enough worldbuilding in a book (“give me more! MORE!”) and another might say of the exact same book that what worldbuilding there is was way too confusing (“I couldn’t keep all those made-up words straight!”).

So how do you, as the author, balance the needs of such a wide range of readers when you’re working in a complex world that needs development? And how do you balance the need to establish your characters, setting, and plot with the need to spool out information to your reader to intrigue them rather than confuse them?

This is a question that pretty much every author and editor of speculative fiction struggles with, particularly because we, as veterans of the genre, are already more comfortable with a lot of worldbuilding jargon than your average teen reader, particularly teen readers whose preference for fantasy runs more toward the contemporary paranormal variety. There are a number of reasons why I think Twilight was so popular on such a broad scale, but one of the biggest ones was the relatability of the situation. So what if you’ve never had a vampire show up at your high school? It could happen!

Think about all the really big fantasy hits of the last few years in children’s and YA fiction: Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Twilight, Hunger Games. Of these books’ beginnings, only The Hunger Games is all far that outside the everyday experiences of your average young reader, and even The Hunger Games starts with a relatable situation—a coal mining family lives in a desperate situation and must hunt for food; while most kids who would have access to The Hunger Games don’t live under a despotic regime, it’s plausible that it could happen in the real world. Harry Potter and Percy Jackson are ordinary kids going to school, living somewhat normal lives (even if abusive ones, in the case of Harry) before their worlds change with the discovery of magic. Their starting point is relatable.

What this means is that readers of Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and Twilight figure out the world alongside the main character. Information is spooled out as the character needs it, so the reader doesn’t have to absorb everything at once. This is a low bar for entry, not requiring much synthesis of information.

What about Hunger Games? Now it gets a little tougher. Suzanne Collins starts out with a perfectly relatable (if a tiny bit cliche) situation, the main character waking up and seeing her family. We get some exposition on Katniss’s family and the cat who hates her. But it becomes non-cliche by page 2, when we learn about the Reaping. Ah! What’s the Reaping, you ask? We don’t know yet. Now the bar for entry is raised. There is a question, the answer for which you’re going to have to read further to find out. The infodumpage level is low, but there is still some exposition in the next few pages, letting us know that Katniss lives in a place called District 12, nicknamed the Seam, and that her town in enclosed by a fence that is sometimes electrified—and which is supposed to be electrified all the time.

Collins’s approach to spooling out a little information at a time is to explain each new term as she goes, but some readers think that feels unnatural in a first person voice because the narrator would already know these things, so why is she explaining them to the reader? It depends on the story, in my opinion—Collins makes it work because of how she crafted Katniss’s voice. It is a very fine line to walk—I can’t tell you how many submissions I’ve gotten that start out with, “My name is X. I am Y years old. I live in a world that does Z,” an obvious example of how this approach becomes downright clumsy when not handled with Collins-esque finesse.

Then there is the opposite end of the spectrum, in which the reader is given clues to work out rather than having any new terms explained to them. This approach needs just as much, if not more, finesse. It’s a process that some readers who are new to speculative fiction might stumble over the most, which is why I think there’s so little of it in middle grade and YA fantasy and science fiction. I’ve seen it called “incluing,” which is a silly word, but I don’t know of another name for it and the description of incluing in that Wikipedia link is exactly the kind of worldbuilding I prefer to see in the beginning of a book, particularly one set in a world that has no connection to our own, or if it’s in the future of our world it’s far enough into the future that the society is probably unrecognizable to us, such as the society in Tankborn.

The prominent example I like to give writers for this kind of worldbuilding is from The Golden Compass. Check out the first page of that book:

 

(I hope that embed worked right! It’s easier just to show you the first page from Google Books than to type up the first few paragraphs myself.)

Pullman jumps right into the scene, with Lyra sneaking down the hallway with her daemon. We don’t even know what the daemon physically looks like until paragraph 4, and even then we don’t know why he’s called a daemon or what makes a daemon special. In fact, this is one of the major conflicts of the book—we need to read more to find out about daemons, and further mysteries are revealed as we read that deepen our understanding of daemons. As we discover more clues that intrigue us, we want to know more, and keep reading.

But the line between intriguing the reader and confusing the reader is very thin, and I would argue that for some readers it’s in a different place than for others. Those of us who are familiar with fantasy might be more willing to patiently wait for more information about daemons because we trust that this author will let us know what we need to know when the time is right. We know that they’re teasing us with this information so as not to overburden us within the first few pages of the book (or, in the case of The Golden Compass, because the reader can’t know what the majority of people in that world don’t know, either).

In situations in which you need to establish a world that’s entirely different from our own, I find that putting a character in a situation that’s somewhat familiar to the reader can help with establishing the unfamiliar. In Karen Sandler’s Tankborn, for example, Kayla has to watch her little brother instead of going to a street fair with her friends. While Kayla might call him her “nurture brother” instead of just her “brother,” it’s still a situation to which a lot of readers can relate, even if it is set on another planet and her brother is catching nasty arachnid-based sewer toads instead of familiar Earth frogs and toads.

For me it’s also the difference between showing and telling. Philip Pullman shows us how his world works, rather than pausing to tell us how it works (“in this world, all people are born with an animal companion called a daemon”). Telling can work, though, especially in small doses—Katniss’s voice is so conversational that the brief moments of telling in the first few pages of The Hunger Games work, particularly because Collins is mostly showing what Katniss is up to. The brief pauses to “infodump” feel like the reader is being told a story by a storyteller, like a friend telling a story over the kitchen table after a nice big meal would pause and explain something you didn’t understand (a friend who’s a very good storyteller). It’s an awareness of audience, in a way, that most speculative fiction doesn’t have the luxury of.

Showing isn’t always better, and telling isn’t always bad, when done right and mixed in with showing. Whichever method you use, remember that sometimes readers will trip over new words so you need to give them as much context as possible without over-infodumping. And here is where the art comes in. I can’t tell you what that balance is, but if you look at examples like the ones above, you’ll get a better feel for how much to reveal and how much to hold back in your first few pages—revealing enough to orient your reader and give them a sense of the differences of this world (while grounding them in something familiar like Lyra’s hallway or Katniss’s humble home) while seeking to avoid overburdening them with too much all at once.

The line for each reader will still be different—heaven knows that I’ve seen reviews criticizing the first few pages of the same book that another reviewer found not-meaty-enough—but you’ll come to find the right balance for your story.

What about you? How have you found the right balance of worldbuilding without overburdening the reader? What books do you recommend as examples of good worldbuilding in the first few pages?

Some incomplete thoughts on post-apocalyptic worldbuilding

- Stacy 2 Comments

Just a few thoughts that combine from reading a couple recently published postapocalyptic trade books and some of the submissions I’ve been going through recently. This isn’t by any means a comprehensive list of things to think about—just a few things that struck me as a pattern in (some) recent reads (and something I notice when it’s done well).

I guess everything I want to say actually falls under the old (and very useful) “show, don’t tell.” And really, one doesn’t even have to apply to postapocalyptic writing, but it’s in a postapocalyptic book that I saw this problem, so here you go.

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
  • If you include newspaper clippings/stories as metatext to support the main narrative, make sure that it actually sounds like a news clipping. Use inverted pyramid structure, starting with the most important details and filling in backstory and history only once important details have been included.

One of my first publishing-related jobs in college was as a newspaper reporter, and the end of my stories—even my feature stories—often got chopped off for space. This is a particular form of writing that means your lede has to be an actual lede, not an introductory sentence, and you don’t include common-knowledge information (stuff all the characters would know because they live in that world) as an infodump in the second paragraph.

  • Less is more in post-apocalyptic worldbuilding.

We usually don’t need to know every detail of the apocalypse in the first chapter, or even by the end of the book. In fact, it usually just slows down the reading and even occasionally turns off a reader to be reminded in every sentence just how bad the world is because of global warming’s effect a hundred years ago or because we ran out of fossil fuels or because a great plague hit the world three hundred years ago. These things are common knowledge to the characters—or perhaps they’re lost knowledge for the character, depending on how long ago the apocalypse happened and how much technology/media had broken down in the years since.

But generally letting the reader know exactly what happened within the first chapter or two turns into an infodump or an as-you-know-Bob. Actually, what you want to do is revealed in that last link—I didn’t know there was a name for it! Incluing, at least according to Wikipedia (which is of course so reliable, but let’s go with it for now unless someone knows of a more technical term), is what you really want to do:

  • Reel out worldbuilding details little by little, cluing the reader in to worldbuilding details as they need the information (or slightly before, so as not to be jarring).

The best incluing example, the one I always go back to, is the first page or so of The Golden Compass, in which Lyra is talking to her daemon as they spy on a conversation in another room. We have no idea what a daemon is, even the basic concept of what one looks like, within the first page—that’s something Philip Pullman spools out to us little by little, creating a mystery, through small, specific details, that hooks us enough to make us want to know more.

These ideas are pretty basic, but so important in a good postapocalyptic tale, in my opinion. The only exceptions I can think of to not letting the reader know the cause of the apocalypse: zombie post-apocalypses, such as Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth (we know the cause of the apocalypse was zombies, because they’re everywhere; though we might not know the cause of zombies, we know the cause of the breakdown of society) and stories in which the apocalypse is currently happening, such as The Carbon Diaries (we see the breakdown of society through the main character’s eyes)—though in either case infodumps still won’t be appreciated.

But in general for most post-apocalyptic tales, I argue that less is more when it comes to revealing the cause of society’s death and allowing it to be a mystery that the reader discovers along the journey. Sometimes that journey will be figuring out why their current society is a dystopia, and hence figuring out the cause of the apocalypse that triggered this new society, but post-apocalyptic and dystopia aren’t synonymous, so sometimes it’ll simply be common knowledge that Earth that Was died in some way so we had to set out for the stars, or that in the characters’ great-grandparents’ generation a great plague swept the earth, or that global warming caused the world to become so flooded that people live on boats, fight over what little earth there is available on those boats, and evolve to grow gills and webbed feet.

Okay, Waterworld isn’t exactly the best example, but you could do worse for a short sweet example of how to worldbuild an apocalyptic backstory . . .

New seminar: Worldbuilding in MG/YA science fiction and fantasy

- Stacy

I have a confirmed date, time, and place for our next local seminar on writing fantasy for children and young adults. This time we’re going to focus specifically on worldbuilding–how it’s different for younger audiences (and how it’s the same as worldbuilding you might hear about in adult books), how to really hit the right tone with the audience you’re seeking to reach, how to use key details to flesh out your setting, how to use worldbuilding to create character, support the plot, and make your world come alive!

Here’s the skinny:

Provo Library, Provo, UT
Bullock Room 309
1-5 p.m.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Deadline: June 19

Cost: $45 for individuals (the increase in price is because I reserved the room for another hour, so we have plenty of time to workshop)
$35 for groups of five or more (make sure when you register to tell me who is in your group, or at least tell me who the “group leader” is)

We’ve got a bigger room this time, so be sure to tell your friends and anyone who might be interested–instead of being limited to 24 people, we can have 30-40 (I won’t want to get bigger than that, because we want to have a good number of people who want to workshop to be able to read).

On the day of the seminar, be sure to bring a sample from your current work in progress. It does not have to be the first chapter! Whatever section you think is the best representative of your worldbuilding and/or that you want the most help in creating a sense of worldbuilding: that’s the section to bring.

As with the previous seminar, we’ll start with me lecturing a little, giving you information on the topic and plenty of examples from great books. Then we’ll start workshopping! You don’t *have* to share your own work, but you’ll get a professional editor’s opinion on how you might improve a particular aspect of your story, and great feedback from all the rest of the people in the class, too.

My intern will be helping me with registration, so the directions for registration are a little different this time. As before, if you want to pay via PayPal, send the payment to me at stacylwhitman AT gmail DOT com, but then send an email to Chersti at cjstapley AT gmail DOT com, giving her the following information:

Name
Address
Phone number
Email
The one thing you’re most hoping to learn about from this class (this helps me to gauge the learning levels of everyone in the class so I can tailor the seminar to the people who are attending)

Note that my email is down, so I won’t be able to answer any questions today until it comes back up. But Chersti will confirm registration, and once I receive the payment I’ll notify her and she’ll keep track of who has paid, confirming with you that we got your payment.

Also, watch that deadline! If I don’t have enough registrants (I need at least 10 people registered to make it worth the room rental), we’ll cancel. But I don’t think we need to worry about that–just a head’s-up to let you know that we need at least a certain number of registrants for it to happen. We’ll have plenty of room for everyone, but you’ll want to register early so that I know you’re coming.