So, if you pay attention to this blog at all, you’ve probably recognized that I, and a lot of people who talk on this blog, do a lot of bashing on worldbuilding. For what we assume to be good reason.
The argument is pretty easy to see if you peruse this blog: worldbuilding adds unnecessary fluff that deviates from plot, character development and overall deadens the sense of wonder by way of murdering with detail.
That’s the argument. I’m not sure it’s right, but that’s the one I’ve been sticking with.
It occurs to me, though, that we don’t see a lot of talk about it from the other side: those who praise worldbuilding, who drool over magic systems and gush about the language of the birds and all the subtle nuances of the tone and touch of a Wombatman. Perhaps it’s that I’m simply missing something. Maybe there’s some glory to worldbuilding that I’m just not clear on? Maybe it adds in a way I hadn’t considered before?
This is my humble request, if you are indeed one of those people who clings to the notion: what is it? What am I missing? Am I using the entirely wrong definition of worldbuilding? Am I just too dense to grasp it? In the interests of discussing this and furthering everyone’s collective knowledge, I’d genuinely like to know.
So tell me. Either here, in email, whatever you want. We should know this.
For me, good worldbuilding helps to immerse you entirely in the novel you’re reading. It engenders trust between reader and author when it is done well. It creates rich depth and detail to a novel.
Some authors who use worldbuilding enormously effectively:
– Jacqueline Carey
– Adrian Tchaikovsky
With both of the above authors, you feel as though if you asked them, they’d know how governors were elected to a small town in a minor part of their world. The great part of it is that they don’t tell the reader this, but you trust that the world is fully fleshed. This makes the novel feel very real.
And, if you trust in the worldbuilding and the fact that the author knows every tiny detail (but doesn’t feel the need to tell you), it can help you completely suspend your disbelief while reading the novel. You know that every step is considered and thought through.
Good worldbuilding can also assist in preventing sudden macguffin syndrome i.e. “I need something to further the plot, so I’ll create it on the spot and shoehorn it in.” When the worldbuilding is done well, the author will know the “rules” and will realise what they can get away with. Hence plot devices become realistic, for want of a better word when dealing with fantasy.
Worldbuilding also = rules. We all prefer a magic system with rules and limitations – it again feels more real. Good worldbuilding and thinking through these rules to begin with ensures the author then sticks to them.
Further to Amanda’s point about the world being fleshed out: I find that good worldbuilding helps me feel that the world is alive, and that there are other people in it – that there is something over the horizon, people there, that are doing their own things. It helps my impression of the size of the world.
Of course, minimal worldbuilding can work too – it’s good for creating a claustrophobic atmosphere, like a zombie movie.
I love worldbuilding and for me it’s all about immersion
If you wander round your local area, you’ll probably find that it has layers of history (more so in Europe than in the US). You’ll find that everywhere has a history. Something was there before what is there now, and stuff happened.
The problem is that people look at Tolkien and his massive infodumps and equate infodump with worldbuilding. That’s not true. What Tolkien did was almost become another character in Lord of the Rings, giving you a guided tour to Middle-Earth. Some people hate it, feeling it breaks the narrative, but for me those passages bring the world alive, make it feel so real that I feel like I already know what’s round the next corner.
In many ways Tolkien’s worldbuilding is very crude and unsubtle. It assaults you. However, the sheer volume and depth of it… well it blew my mind – a supreme act of imagination that I feel has yet to be matched.
Because I know that Tolkien knows Middle-Earth, I could, metaphorically, ask any question about the world and he would instantly give the answer. As a result I believe in that world. As a writer I’m constantly being broken out of immersion by recognising the tricks, knowing when the writer has cludged something or made something up on the fly. I never get that with Tolkien.
Worldbuilding doesn’t have to be about pages of infodumps though. There is a difference between saying “X picked up a piece of fruit” and “X picked up a blue apple, a southern delicacy rare in these parts.” It doesn’t need pages of description on the aforementioned blue apple, but it gives the world texture and depth. It’s like the difference between a two dimensional and three dimensional character. A two dimensional character will be flat and predictable, and then act irrationally without it feeling natural. A three-dimensional character will have all those little nuances that make them interesting and real and honest.
I often say that worldbuilding is what you leave out the novel. It’s often done badly, rarely done well. If I believe the world, then I’ll believe all that comes with it – the races, the magic. With good worldbuilding, you find yourself getting lost. find your imagination sparking ideas about that world.
I love worldbuilding. There I’ve said it. Feels like I should be sitting on a top of a rose-covered float, slowly swaying down main street, smiling with the rest of the court, waving my hand like an animatronic shop-dummy.
In fact, I sit squarely if I’m sitting virtually so, in Gene Wolfe’s camp, and not on the fence. Not that all fantasy novels with a bland, generic backstory are the “piglets of ignorance” suckling at the world-teat but that world-building can be a gem in the crown of the story. Of course, what’s better, it can add substantively to a book and give a deeper dimension to the struggles of the characters.
In cases like that, it gives a verisimilitude, so we don’t fall through the cracks between what we already know, and what has been imagined out of whole cloth. It lulls us with sweet dirty words whispered in our shell-like ears, and doesn’t let sunlight break in through the purple curtains drawn across the window casements – so we see that the king-sized velvet bed is really a mound of dead rats sewn together with the hair of dead children.
If all your effort as a writer has gone into the plot, then there’s not much left over for the world. Especially, if you’re setting it adrift in a fantasy universe where magic works or the land-masses are completely different. Too often there is a cut-n-paste faux-(insert time and continent, mostly medieval-esque Western-y Europe) serving as a floating backdrop. But only minus the staggering depth of 10,000 plus years of real human history.
You might argue that genre writers can afford to ignore in-depth world-building as they can literally make things up as they go – no need then to explain why their talking wolves talk, or how their elves are different. But that’s not true either. There is magic and strange events, willful changes made to the world and its possibilities and a keen reader can often spot the gaps where you’ve not thought things through.
It doesn’t mean you have to share everything that you’ve developed, or infodump all over the page. It doesn’t have to become world-porn, where writers go on about the colour of every wizard’s greasy jerkin – and what that means because the Archmage Griz’ul’mk III decreed it so, after the Second War With the Nighthogs back in Anno 321 of the Chair.
If you are going to write about your fantastical world, it had better both be sufficiently fantastical that it is interesting in and of itself – and possess agency. A character then, but one that wears cities and has a hat made from polar ice caps. You weave in a backstory, a rational, a history – even complete with blank spaces on the map and mysteries that perhaps *you* don’t even know, but you’ve thought about it, and made that decision. Not just because you couldn’t be bothered and needed to get caught up with back episodes of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.
The world, when it intrudes, needs to be doing something just as important as the rest of the characters, as for example, Wolfe’s alternative Urth of the New Sun certainly does. There are lots of bizarre fantastical bits, and he trots them out when they have lines to say, and then shoves them back in the closet or at least left of stage, when they need to be mute and not get in the way of the rest of the players. The magic and deep history and mythic figures feel real because they’re self-consistent, overlapping, and give the illusion of fractally occurring depth.
It works. That’s a really “imagined” world, with lots of ideas going on, even if there are no maps and he leaves the corners bare. And frankly scary. The real world once was like that, and explanations for everything, a wikipedia entry on the universe and god, didn’t exist. But obviously, Gene knows far more about it than we do, just like the strange wizened gnomes who put up those wikipedia entries. How does that work? The hell if I know. We don’t mind that in life, why should we in fiction?
Just to note:
“I’m not just happy to see you. That’s just my tongue, inserted firmly in my cheek.” But I’m serious as well, deadly serious – like the plague. World-building works when it is done with skill and hand-in-hand with everything else. By itself, or without the story and characters to support it, world-building falls flat.
Good worldbuilding is not lecturing the reader on what comes around the bend, but what will go around the bend, and understanding how that shapes society. I once heard it described as the difference between a cardboard stage of a city and the city itself. The fact that it’s all there, that you understand everything that’s going on, adds cohesion. Makes it feel more real, because as things come up you know how they fit in the larger picture.
Which, mind you, is generally best left in the back, excluded unless it is actually part of the story. Just because you have a city block to work with, and it looks real, does not mean that you should stop and do a guided tour of everything. No, we do not need or want to know, even if the fact that if we keep walking straight that you won’t push over the stage when you walk into the background.
My problem with world building isn’t with the concept itself; to the contrary, I think good world building is a critical component to a good story. I couldn’t agree more with what E.M. Edwards said above: “By itself, or without the story and characters to support it, world-building falls flat.” Absolutely.
World building should flow naturally from the plot and the characters. My problem is that too often, though certainly not always, world building is done by a massive info dump or 15,000 words to describe some inanimate object. An info dump can, of course, have its uses and often it is necessary to give some color to the world (usually its history). But if it doesn’t come naturally from the interactions of the characters within the context of the story then it is, at least as I see it, a disruption that interferes with the enjoyment of the story.
My biggest problem however is when excessive descriptions of palaces, landscapes, clothes (aarrgghh!), etc. is used as world building. I know writing fiction is incredibly difficult. I sure as heck can’t do it. But it seems to me that relying on page(s) length descriptions of some dining hall in a palace is nothing but a waste of words and time (nothing makes my eyes glaze over faster than the word “gilt”). Use 70 words rather than 700 to describe the hall. If it is important to the characters and that moment in the story, then by all means tell me what it is but only tell me what is important. My imagination can fill in the details. Patrick Rothfuss does this very well and, conversely and as much as I love him and his books, Robert Jordan does not. This is one of the (many) reasons I like the books of our host.
World building is important; heck, it is indispensable. It is *how* it is done that makes all the difference.
Well, I totally disagree that worldbuilding deadens the sense of wonder; it ought to do the opposite. In the case that it does kill the mood, though, that probably means it’s a hackneyed world; it has already been wondered at by the reader, so that the enormous walls built aeons ago by half-men-half-gods, the marketplaces full of the peoples of every land, and the mountains that have held the secrets of the world’s heart since time immorial aren’t worth reading about again.
But the fact that I can so readily slap together a goofy list of things that might be awesome if we hadn’t heard them a million times before is due to the fact that fantasy’s got a mean streak of poor world-building/telling – which is probably the reason why you (Sam) have grown a skin against it. Personally, I’ve put down more books than I can count – books that showed promise in terms of their story, etc. – because atmosphere and imagery overtook the other aspects of the book. So I dig ya.
But, it really isn’t a rule; there’s not even a balance to strike. On the one hand, I love Joe Abercrombie’s books, which basically have no world-building whatsoever; and on the other, I love Jeff VanderMeer’s books, which, in many ways, ARE world-building. I remember reading Steph Swainston for the first time and learning that the main character, Jant, wears T-shirts. It blew my fucking mind. Fucking t-shirts! Fucking world-building.
Worlds can be built lavishly or sparsely, but the point was already best put by Adrian Faulkner: worldbuilding is “what you leave out the novel.” As a reader, I don’t ever want to notice it being built around me. Some people have commented here that they want to know how the world “works,” but I couldn’t care less. In the same way that I have no idea how this computer I’m using works, I don’t care how fantastic worlds operate; I don’t care about magic, economics, or anything else. If I start to think about those things, the story’s lost me; and I read books for story, not instructions.
But that doesn’t mean story is paramount, either, because creatures, things, and events are part of the “being-in-the-world” experienced by the reader, and that being-in-the-world is dominated by being-in-the-story. The world is not pure setting, but the totality of what goes on in a fantasy book is undoubtedly worldbuilding: the world comes to me through the story, and I know it in the same wondrous way that I know the real world, i.e., not really knowing it at all, but moving through it with ease, amazement, and occasional despair.
It’s just that, as a reader, I want to experience these things as a story – not a manual.
Finally, as penitence for my boning the idea of “story” so many times and quite obviously contradicting myself elsewhere, let’s all read Nick Mamatas’s awesome article, “Against Story”:
http://booklifenow.com/2011/05/against-story/
I personally use worldbuilding purely in context of my character development; if I know where my character comes from, what that place and its people are like, I find it a lot easier to have my character develop in the way their upbringing requires of them.
I do not believe it has to be an integral part of the story experience however. If character is done well, you shouldn’t have to explain to your reader that a character is acting in a certain way because of where they come from, it should come across in their personality. You shouldn’t need a whole paragraph proclaiming “in country X they believe in custom Y, therefore person Z will do this”. If you know your character well enough, you shouldn’t have to explain them to your reader.
By all means create a world to chuck your characters into, but unless it is entirely necessary for the story to work, don’t throw it in our faces when we want to know what happens to your characters. People naturally have an interest in what other people are doing, using a world to play on that is how you do worldbuilding, in my humble little opinion.
Amanda nicked a couple of my points, but I’ll expound on them.
Ignoring personal flavour or preference, there’s a couple of key plotting tools that world building to a greater depth is integral too, or tropes it helps to subvert.
One is the obvious Chekov Gun. Ok I know part of the Author’s job is to fold these in seamlessly, but with epicness comes that inherent size of things. In otherwords, it’s pretty difficult to hide the “end of the world” consequence if your foreshadowing necessitates the inclusion of something that could end the world (“Hey there’s this amazingly powerful thing that will never fall into the hands of Evil and propagate the End of the world.……DOH!”). Good, grand-scale world building allows you to bury that fact in deep history, or in structured magic systems, making the whole thing less obvious and, hopefully, allowing the reader to come to that conclusion without you saying so, then having a decent chunk of doubt that they are wrong, specifically because they haven’t outright said so.
Also, it allows bait and switching without it seeming cheap. Everyone knows history is somewhat subjective, and the well done trope of having a character playing 2 roles (one overt, one hidden) within the book still remains effective and not boring. Deep world building allows one character in one location to be a legend in several others….think Durzo Blint turning out to be a whole litany of famous heroes. Bait and Switch only possible by world building.
One of the key aspects is, as Amanda said, Rules. Build rules and restrictions around things and it improves it. Say what you like about the likes of Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, but at the end of their books you can work out your own ways of how to defeat the big bad that are wholly consistent with the rules they’ve laid down. By allowing the reader to come up with alternate, successful, methods is actually a good thing because it keeps the reader unsure as to how the final outcome (victory for the hero 99% of the time) plays out. And in fantasy, because you know that 99% of the time good will win through, that ‘how will they win’ is as much of a draw as the victory itself. Yes, by making things vague and nebulous it has a similar effect (possibly preferable – the reader has zero idea how the good guy will win) but as a trade off you lose a bit of that engagement the reader might have in seeing how closely his method stacks up to the actual events.
And lastly, Setting, Character and motivation are all affected by world building. Some need only a smattering of facts, but you can create more (not necessarily better or worse ones) through enlarging the scope of the world-building.
I’ve bored you all….my work here is done
To me, worldbuilding is just as necessary as character development. I can’t tell a story without characters, and I can’t tell a story without a world to put them in. The more of the world I have figured out before I start writing, the easier it is for me to use it in a story. So I suppose worldbuilding is part of the outlining process for me, more than the actual writing process. I have all the information I need behind the scenes. How much of that information finds its way into the story depends on the story.
And that’s just it, isn’t it. Every story, every writer and every world is different, so how can there be one answer? Sam Sykes can write epic fantasy without relying on worldbuilding, while Tolkien relies on it too much. Somewhere in the middle, Jim Butcher is busy making his world a little bit bigger with every book, and Neil Gaiman is constructing single-volume myths that hint at whole universes hidden between the lines.
So there’s worldbuilding and there’s worldbuilding. Chapter-long infodumps that make you want to forget how to read, and elaborate, subtle webs you don’t even see until you’re hopelessly entangled. And thank Jebus for that. Everything would be the same otherwise.
Do you mean you hate worldbuilding as a reader or as a writer?
A lot of genre readers read to escape to new worlds. I think this applies to fantasy readers more than anyone (I have no hard stats to back this up), and so the joy of reading doorstop fantasy is getting the histories and mythology spelled out, and it is an entire escape from this world.
(I also expect that gamers love the worldbuilding because it inspires their gaming worlds.)
As a writer, I enjoy building my world so I can make it a real place for my readers. I find it harder to place the worldbuilding in the narrative without explaining anything.
For example, my SF-Noir stories have automated self-navigating cars. I never explain this, but my narrator never says “I drove to..” but “my car took me to …” and some people tell their car the address they want to go to. I have to not give into temptation and explain that the cars autonavigate.
The key, I think, is that when you say world building you don’t mean that at all (at least how I define it) but rather “detail.” Exhaustive detail, to be precise. But that’s not all it is. That sense of wonder you mentioned, that’s world building too, or at least what results from a world building job done well. It’s the act of creating and populating the world, and the suspense-deadening-detail-swarm is but one of many ways to approach it. You’re still world building if you create Shicts, even if you don’t create a full Shictish lunar calendar complete with high holidays and rituals to celebrate them with.
Worldbuilding! I love it – but maybe my definition’s different from yours? I rarely insert detail for its own sake; the language of the birds might be fascinating but it better damn well be relevant if I’m going to have to read a 10 paragraph tangent on it.
I can tell you a lot more about the world of my WIP than is actually in the text. There’s just no real reason to include a lot of the detail, but if I need/want it, it’s there. It’s a puzzle, to me; I really enjoy figuring it out.
At the same time, solving the puzzle doesn’t mean I have to go around shoving it in readers’ faces, like “Hey! Hey! Look what I did!” That’s not why I write and that’s not why I puzzle things out. Just because I spent a ton of time parsing something out in painstaking detail doesn’t mean my reader is automatically required to care. Worldbuilding done badly is just done by writers who have forgotten that little fact…or who don’t care.