marycatelli | Intricate Worlds

How do you build an intricate fantasy world that holds up to intensive fan interrogation?

The first points I think of are -- what are the stories that let you have such a world? Since, after all, you can make it as intricate as you like without the fans ever getting wind of it.

Well, you can't be afraid of description. Teresa Edgerton's The Queen's Necklace has nice examples where the descriptions of the city are given between passages of the plot. Even if your descriptions are more neatly interwoven into the story, you need to give them, to draw in the details of the world. Which means you need at least one thing to draw your readers on in the absence of plot motion -- and this probably means you want an intriguing style, so that people will read on to hear what this engaging narrator has to say, or readerly curiosity about the world. Susannah Clarke actually got me over a hundred pages into Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by those two. Also, if info is slotted into the characters' mouths or thoughts, they need motives to tell them -- a college lecture perhaps, or a test they have to take, or a small child showing off what he learned in school.

And that means a plot that allows much of the world to be shown. Lots of choices here. There's the classical picaresque one: a character lopes about the world, seeing this and that and the other thing. Has some kind of excuse plot, where the plot is chosen to move the character about, and contain the setting like a plain wooden bowl holding the marvelous and magic fruits. A quest is classic for obvious reasons. And it helps to have a grand plot with lots of characters -- a great variety, who will see all kinds of things and know all kinds of things -- having points of view to reveal this corner and that one. An intrigue in court, where the characters are always being influenced by news from outside, even though they never leave, would touch the opposite extreme.

Series, of course, give you even more scope.

But even if you start at that end, there comes a point where you have to fill in the backdrop to stage your intricate plot and cast of thousands.

An intricate world is a tension between two opposite forces.

On one hand, if your world is simply and obviously operated by a few principles -- dominated by the working of elemental magic, or shape-shifting -- there's no room for intricate details. Fire and water annihilate each other, and so air and earth -- hoohum, I hope there's a good plot because you aint' getting a chapter or two out of that, let alone a book.

On the other, a random jumble of dinosaurs, fire-ball-wielding wizards, and an intriguing city of merchant a la Venice turned up to eleven, is not a world. It's a jumble. Like a story, a world needs unity to hang together. You get something of this effect in The Hobbit where Tolkien, particularly in the beginning, was just writing a sportive children's tale. The giants whose gambols drove the company to take refuge in the cave? Never appeared in Middle Earth again.

Some broad strokes principles help unify a world. It does not, however, have to be something that you can write down in a sentence -- or a word, though it can be. (Steampunk, say.) It can be just the feeling that some things work together. A Mad Scientist with his beautiful daughter, perhaps, and a great exhibition at a World Fair. You can get the effect by lumping up a whole bunch of bright, sparkling ideas and seeing which ones play nicely together.

One grand rule for an intricate world is that it needs lots of ideas. Worlds that crystallize about a single concept may be grand for those story purposes, but not for an intricate setting.

This is where your reading comes into play. Reading lots of history, particularly primary source, both gives a feeling for worlds that hang toegether, and provides inspiration for bright sparkling ideas to enliven the work.

Don't forget fictional history. An intricate world has some events behind it, driving the foreground; glimpses of the gears hard at work behind the front of the clockwork makes it more convincing.

Part of

bittercon

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

ljlee.livejournal.com

Is an intricate world an end to itself, or the means to support good story (or stories)? If the latter, the relationship between story and worldbuilding deserves some thought.

I can think of a several advantages of an intricate world in that it:

1. Supports deeper, longer stories: The world is "filled in" enough that there is potential for more stories. The richer the world, the more there is to tickle the imagination. What's going on in the next country over? What happened 200 years ago when the kingdom was founded? And so on.

2. Gives rise to more conflict: If a world is populated with people and groups with different agendas, problems to solve, places to explore and more, the possible conflicts are going to get more complex and larger in scale. It's going to start feeling cluttered if everything plus the kitchen sink are thrown in willy-nilly, hence the need for coherency (hanging together, as you said) as well as intricacy.

3. Draws in fan interest: When fans are given the tantalizing sense that there's a whole world there to explore, they will respond with more engagement.

That said, if the goal is to tell a good story rather than the worldbuilding itself, it stands to reason that the original goal should be to do just as much or as little worldbuilding as the story demands rather than to go all-out from the first trying to create the next Middle-Earth or Galactic Republic.

In fact, it's worth noting that both these highly intricate worlds started out modestly with sound, expandable core ideas. Arguably the needs of the story, other people's excitement about the world, and rampant commercialization (in the case of Star Wars) drove the expansion of the worlds, for better or for worse.

With the above lessons in mind I think the following principles are workable ones for getting started:

1. Start small. I think it's important not to go overboard at first but to keep the worldbuilding, along with the other areas of labor, to what's necessary for the original project. If it's a single short story, for instance, there's usually no need for an entire planet with countries and a full history and all the major cultures and religions. A city will usually suffice.

2. Hook the audience in. That said, if this is a world you're interested in expanding in the future, there's no need to limit its growth. Leave a hook, some tantalizing bit of information about the world, that hints at a larger world and more possible stories. For The Hobbit it was the One Ring. For Star Wars it was the sense of a broader history and an entire literal universe to explore. Leave some questions dangling to give the sense of a bigger world out there.

3. Keep it coherent. If you're going to expand this world, the last thing you want is a structural flaw that's going to leave it wobbling under its own weight when you make it bigger. Strive for internal consistency--Middle-earth had its languages, Star Wars had the Force and the morality surrounding it.

4. Extrapolate, extrapolate, extrapolate. Your world can be based on fairly simple principles, but you'd better be prepared to take them to their logical/fanciful conclusions. A world solely based on mutual annihilation between four elements is boring and supports very little story; but what if you expanded the elements into four distinct cultures, geographies, and ways of life? And what if these cultures were in conflict with each other and struggling with the idea of worldwide balance? You'd get Avatar: The Last Airbender, a franchise with a rich world where almost an infinite number of stories can and do take place.

The same goes for all areas of worldbuilding. If you want a setting with fairies in the modern world, think about what that would entail. Would fairies become viral video stars? Would they try to stay hidden? Would they be granted equal rights and freedoms if they "came out?" Would everyone believe they exist? What if they're like Tinker Bell and are dying out from disbelief? And so on. Extrapolation is your friend in all areas of worldbuilding, whether expanding a world, drawing in audience interest, or keeping the world hanging together as a coherent whole.

From:

houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com

Star Wars 1977 and The Hobbit both had POV characters whose provincialism was important to the plot, and an important part of their character. So we learned about the world -- and it explanded -- as they learned about it.

From:

being chiefly about the written word

Intricate Worlds

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags