So I’ve been a published author for roughly three months now and it’s sometimes a little staggering to realize how much I was unprepared for. To name one (of many), I used to think of the word ‘worldbuilding’ as sort of the consolation prize of complimentary books. To say a book had great worldbuilding (and indeed, had it emphasized to the highest compliment) suggested to me that a book lacked in character and plot.
However, I’ve recently come to think on this a little more thanks to a review of Tome of the Undergates by James Long that I’m quite pleased with. In it, one of his chief complaints is the rather skimpy setting. It’s true, Tome of the Undergates is not a particularly far-ranging adventure and I can’t really take a beef with his gripe with it. It was an intentional point on my part and it didn’t particularly work for him. That’s fine.
What interested me was this statement from his prior review of Shadow Prowler by Alexey Pehov regarding monsters.
Worse, Pehov feels the need to tell the reader everything about a particular creature when we meet it for the first time. So, Harold will find himself in a confrontation with a peculiar creature, but before the action can commence, we have to put up with several paragraphs giving us a brief run-down of the creature’s habits and characteristics (get used to it, as this trait appears as early as the second page).
You might think I’m trying to confront James here. Well, you couldn’t be more wrong. Honestly, sometimes you leap to conclusions so swiftly you just make me want to slap you. But I still love you, baby…I still love you. We can work this out.
Rather, James has the unfortunate honor of being nailed to a cross and raised up as a banner of discussion in my evolving thoughts about worldbuilding. He serves only to act as two examples that support the question, that one being how do we go about worldbuilding?
We’ve seen excellent examples of it. George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is set in the midst of high-rolling, power-playing nobles with grudges and ambitions that affect the whole world and this lends it an excellent reason to explore the vast and detailed world he’s created. Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora revolves around a city that’s basically its own character, and we’re just as happy to know it as we are to know Locke and Jean.
And we’ve also seen poorer examples. Some people will decry The Wheel of Time series for its encyclopedic references to things that don’t affect the story (while others embrace the series just for that). And there’s always going to be those who point to a new book and say: “He’s no Tolkien.”
But, then again, this is my blog and I am an emotionally-crippled manchild with a desperate need for attention, so presumably you’ve come to see what I might do.
As I said, the relatively close focus in Tome of the Undergates was a conscious decision on my behalf. Rest assured, the world I’ve created is quite big and I fully intend to beat each and every inch of land into your skulls…but only when they apply to the characters.
I take a “Chekov’s Gun” approach to worldbuilding. That is, I only bring to attention that which is pertinent to the characters. There might political power struggles over a throne elsewhere in the world. There might be revolutions going on, power plays, famine, drought, crises of all manner. But that doesn’t always matter to people the same way.
Our world, this one in which we plod across in meaty shells, has been pretty messed up for the past every God damned year, but a lot of crazy crap is going down these few days. We’ve political scandals and environmental crises at home. We’ve got military dictatorships and terrorists abroad. Serial killers walk the streets, the media is dishonest and pointless, one man tells us the value of art is decreasing because no one likes him while another one says that his generation is a cesspool in which certain breeds of shit just aren’t welcome. The world is going straight to hell and no one seems to care…but for good reason.
Somewhere in a little apartment, a place with white walls and the cans of paint he intended to wash away the blandness with, with a glass table picked up from Pier 1 Imports and four cheap wicker chairs that were intended to convey a sense of cultural awareness for any culture but the one he was born into and a bottle of imported wine that is barely touched because he didn’t like the taste of it, a man is about to commit suicide. He’s got the gun in his hands right now, he’s staring down the barrel as his self-preservation instincts scramble against a much better organized sense of overwhelming despair.
His death is meaningless, really. He works at Lowe’s Home Improvement (he got the paint at a discount), he votes like the angry people on the street tell him to vote and he’s never hurt anyone and meant it, though he’s always intended to. The reason for his death is even less important: his girlfriend left him. This is ridiculous, of course. There are millions more women in this world, much better-looking, much smarter. There are women who won’t criticize him for buying wine that he has no intention of drinking, women who will let him buy folding chairs instead of these expensive wicker pieces of shit, women who will come home and find that he has no idea how to make the complicated dinner he had planned for her birthday. Maybe they’ll smile and sigh at him, too.
His death is insignificant, the reason for it moreso. Against the countless tragedies unfurling outside his apartment, the deaths, the illnesses, the poverty, the agonies, the fact that he can no longer be with one specific woman amongst many for the immediate future is utterly pointless. There is true tragedy, there are true problems out there.
And he doesn’t give a shit about any of that. His whole world is the gun in his hands and the empty space on the bed.
Maybe I’m doomed to never have anything more to say than this, but it always, always goes back to character. What’s important to the world is not important to a man questioning his own sanity. The fact that her God is supposed to be vigilant to suffering does nothing for a woman who suffers. Kings are made and faiths are shattered and the man whose lost his sons doesn’t care about anything else.
That’s my reasoning, though. You might have one that goes differently. I’d love to hear it.
A fine example Sam, but you’re missing something. Something vitally important in your sealed room.
Character doesn’t exist in a vacuum. They need air to thrive. Cheap wicker chairs don’t import themselves. Existential angst generally is born farther from home than just inside of our lonely skulls. The world outside our windows, and outside the windows of all the windows we open up inside our little boxes, can never, ever, be fully kept from coming in.
It’s an uninvited houseguest but without it – we’re just a thinly drawn sketch, trapped inside a blank, beige-coloured box.
The sneer the man received when he mispronounced the wine’s name – one laid down half a continent and a whole ocean away, like the grapes that died beneath the pneumatic stomp of the chateau’s expensive crusher; the contempt he saw reflected in the clerk’s tired eyes, and mirrored back by his girlfriend’s disapproving gaze, both then and there and later that same night when she threw down her napkin in disgust and walked out of his life; the laugh he saw or thought he saw secretly traded between the two, curling on the corners of their traitorous lips – that’s the point of the knife without which you’re left holding only the cardboard handle of the weapon they screwed into his heart. It’s like having the firing pin, but without a striker.
Market forces which made the crushing alienation of his work place follow him home, like his father before him – influenced in his own case by the financial upheavals of the month which plunged shares both foreign and domestic into a panicked rearguard action – that’s the act that first placed the dull blue metal in his hand.
A rouge trader with an online gambling addiction and a secret transsexual girlfriend kept on the side – working for a French banking house in a gleaming glass-sided tower in now Chinese Hong Kong, he’s the one who mailed it to him or at the very least, bought the bullets that your character took home. His ghost hovers just outside the window, having himself jumped from the 58th story with a nose full of white courage and his dismissal slip in his hand the Wednesday before.
The lowering cloud which isn’t just a cloud, nor just a symbol of clouds, not even a spirit – but a bird, a wind, a nameless dread that he can feel not just see even with the blinds bought last week by his girlfriend from Ikea fastened tight – it doesn’t just blow through the room, across his hand and down the chamber of the gun, it blows right out into the reader’s mind, or maybe, just maybe that’s where it truly is blowing from.
You can say it’s the little things that matter, to both the characters that we lift up on silken threads and make dance across the page, and to our own. You can say that, but it’s the little things that march right out of the room and cry you false when you do.
Even if you never talk about it, you know it’s there. We certainly do. No woman or man these days can be an island unless they live on one – deaf, mute, and receptionless, with hands ending in stumps and not a soul nearby to tap out morris code SOSs on their skin. We’re never that cut off as the man is in your example above. Life, scattered far and wide and like radio waves to which we sometimes tune in to and other times simply bathe in their secret codes, has a way of seeping in through the cracks and under the door.
It’s the same in books, and fantasy needs it all the more, because we don’t necessarily inhabit the same worlds, the same time, the same space. Our readers can’t just assume they know the background score.
That’s why you have to built it, even if your readers only glimpse it on the horizon. Your characters need it as well. They have to have felt the resonance of it in their bones while they were growing, ringed there along with childhood beatings and malnutrition, in order for them to stand alone, seemingly unsupported by the greater world that has in fact had a hand in every atom that’s been stacked up one upon another.
Mood, atmosphere, the language of symbols, and verisimilitude aside, why would we want it any other way? If it’s just about character, and nothing more, then we’re truly alone, blank slates each tucked away in a doorless empty room.
My advice for any writer is to find the world that’s waiting just outside your characters. Fill it in even if you never use it. It needs to be there. It is to a very large part, what makes them who they are.
Eric
Great blog, Sam. I can relate (a lot). I completely agree that the story begins and ends with character. Worldbuilding can be lovely, but it’s essentially window dressing.
Best of luck with Tome.
Sam, I wanna read the book about the man with the Pier 1 table. And I agree, we are all characters relating (or not relating) to other characters. If that makes us self-absorbed and less-than-conscious of the greater world around us at all times, then so be it. I am a localized creature, for now, and this is the package.
So, you suffered through the long version. Here’s the short. Or short-ish as I’m trying to curb my appetite for destroying my enemies through long winded diatribes and meandering asides – not Sam, that I consider you an enemy, where I to consider you at all, that is. Not the angriest man alive, certainly not. I’m just saying that I can go on a bit, now and then, if I don’t stop myself.
Did I tell you that’s my main reason for suffering Twitter? It’s a funny story, really. I figured it was good for me, if not for the world at large. I mean, I can’t even describe a bowel movement in 140 characters or less, but I’m learning, the devil take the hindmost and all, but I’m trying.
Yes. Back to the discussion: I see what you mean. As irritated as I can get about fantasy authors who simply unroll a faded photocopy of some D&D map they drew in the 7th grade, where half the names have come off in the wash, and use it as a substitute for actually putting in the hard graft this is involved in making an original secondary world – and Sam, this irritates me, it truly does – there are worse things.
I save my real, vesuvius of ire for those authors who have to explain *everything* in gigantic info dumps, all at once or even periodically like they didn’t listen to the advice about not drinking the magic water (of knowledge). And they do this, oh how they do this to me. They dump, and then they light it, and then they run away and I’m left beating out the hundred and fifty pages of them nattering on about King Blothid XI’s reign of middling terror and how this raised the Company of the Seventeen Hundred and Three to take back the Nasimul Jewels of Power, and blah, blah, blah until my foot is sore and the whole house stinks. This is much worse.
What I was trying to get at is that you need it there, even if you don’t talk about it. I’m not saying you don’t, because I haven’t read the book so what do I know. But character doesn’t stand alone in contemporary novels. This is due in a large part to the fact that they’re based in a complex secondary world we all already know. We should after all, because we live there – or our ancestors did, or perhaps that’s where the kids are headed. The point – see, I told you I’d get there, brevity, – the point is that in a speculative setting the farther you travel from the real world, the more I feel you’re responsible for setting up the signposts for those who follow you into your sick little creation. They can’t read your mind or your notes, so you’ve got to give them enough that they understand the wider world upon which your characterization stands.
No info dumps – or if you’re very good, then you can get away with some. They’re best however when they flow into the story as organically as is possible, bit by bit, so perhaps you’ve struck exactly the right balance, I don’t know.
Finally, I agree with Anna K. I’m not sure if Tome of the Undergrates is for me, but I really think that book you’re writing about the man who works at Lowe’s is one I could get behind, all the way.
Keep me posted.
Eric
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Trying to find interesting fantasy authors 🙂
Blogs sure tell a lot, lol. Very cool post