If one is writing in the modern world, this isn’t so much of a problem. One can presume one’s readers will be familiar with the real-life infrastructure that exists, so one can pretty much ignore it unless or until one needs a convenient pothole to blow out a tire during a chase scene, or a critical call to be dropped in the middle.

If one is writing historical fiction – even fairly near-past, like twenty years ago – one needs to pay a lot more attention. A lot more, because infrastructure is something we almost all take for granted…and that makes it a prime place where authorial blind spots come back to bite them.

I was reminded of this recently when reading a student manuscript set in the late 80s, in which the student cheerfully assumed the existence of pocket cell phones and text messaging because he’d never, ever lived in a world without them.

One can, occasionally get away with this sort of thing by establishing that one’s characters are early adopters and very happy with the changes all this cool new technology has brought to their lives, but this, too, requires that the author notice that certain things simply weren’t available at certain points in the past. It also requires that the author think about (or research) how fast new technologies and infrastructure spread. The real world doesn’t work like the old John W. Campbell SF stories, where the heroes would invent a cool new gadget, and within two weeks they’d have produced and distributed enough of them for everyone in the world to have one.

But that’s all near-term stuff. What I wanted to talk about is the infrastructure of your average medieval fantasy novel. Which tends to be skeletal, if it’s there at all.

For example, consider the healing professions in the modern world. We have doctors, pharmacists, dentists, nurses, LPNs, chiropractors, acupuncturists, nurses’ aides, surgeons, med techs…and that’s even before you start in on specializations like cardiologists, pediatricians, anesthesiologists, radiologists…the list goes on and on. In most medieval fantasy novels, there are Healers and maybe midwives, and that’s it. Granted, real life medieval Europe didn’t have as wide a variety of medical practitioners as we do today, but they had more than “doctor” and “midwife.”

Physical infrastructure, such as transportation, is likewise frequently taken for granted in fantasy. When the rare wine that only the king drinks is poisoned, the author will likely spend a lot of time researching the poison, but often very little thinking about just why the wine is rare, and exactly how it got from the vineyard several countries over to the king’s table. Is there water transport, or really good roads, or are dragons common enough (and tamed enough) to haul freight like barrels of wine from city to city? Where did those roads or ships or dragons come from? How long have they been around?

Lots of medieval European cities have walls; lots of medieval fantasy novels therefore give their cities walls without thinking much about why the walls are there. Walled cities imply war, and not just one, but enough battles and seiges and attacks to make it worthwile putting up a wall. Also, if it’s been there for a while and the city is a living one, the city is likely to expand beyond the wall. If the wars and so on are still going on, that means the town will need, first, somewhere for all those folks outside the wall to stay during an attack, and, eventually, a second wall. And of course there’s the question of maintenance – somebody has to repair the wall after every attack, and check for various sorts of weather damage. It’s a lot of work, and expensive and time-consuming, and the town is likely to keep it up only if it really needs the protection.

A lot of the time, it won’t be necessary for the story to say much about the roads or ships or walls, or to go into the whole chain of people (grape pickers, vintners, coopers, carters, glass-blowers, bottlers, etc.) who have to exist behind the scenes in order for the king to have a bottle of wine on his table. Every once in a while, though, paying a little attention to this stuff can keep a writer from accidentally creating a tremendous plot hole. Alternatively, thinking about ways the wine can cover the thousand miles from vineyard to king’s table can lead to the invention of the dragon freight haulers, which could go a long way toward making a run-of-the-mill medieval fantasy into something with an interesting and unique feel.

First off, landscape isn’t the same as setting. They overlap, of course, but one can tell an urban tale set in Denver, a rural tale set at a dude ranch twenty or forty miles west, or a story of aspiring ski stars set at a Canadian ski resort, and they’ll all have similar landscape, in the form of the Rocky Mountains.

Landscape, for my purposes, is a combination of the underlying geology – the rivers, hills, plains, lakes, mountains, etc. – and the way the land looks at the moment. Cultivated fields, lush forests, trees blackened by a recent wildfire or blown flat by a storm, a wasteland of stumps left by someone cutting acres of trees…all those are part of the landscape.

Setting includes landscape, but it also includes a lot more of what people have done on the landscape (as opposed to what they have done to the landscape, like digging canals or cutting trees). When you say a book is set in Paris, you’re including a lot more in that simple phrase than just the fact that the book is set in a city built on a broad river with some islands in it. You’re including political things – the country, the government at whatever time period you’ve chosen (and all the tensions with other governments that happen to be current), the language, the ethnic mix of people you’d expect to find. You’re including history, from the World Wars to Napoleon to the French Revolution and on back to Julius Ceasar’s Gallic wars. You’re including cultural stuff, from the food to the Louvre to the Moulin Rouge to customs to clothes.

From a writer’s perspective, landscape is a lot easier to make convincing adjustments to than setting, especially if we’re talking a fantasy or SF world that isn’t like Earth at all. I’ve solved several plot problems by inventing an impassable landscape feature (mountains, a river gorge, a swamp) and plunking it right where my characters were trying to go to avoid a difficulty (instead of facing it the way I wanted them to). Presto, they’re stuck doing what I want.

If I’d tried to do the same thing with setting, the ripple effect would mean changing all sorts of other things – at best, a heavy-duty rewrite; at worst, a completely different book. Of course, there’s a ripple effect from changing landscape, too, but it usually ripples out away from the story, into the Terra Incognita that the characters haven’t been to (so no rewriting) and aren’t going to go to ever (which was the point of inventing impassable mountains in the first place).

Landscape is something that different people react to in different ways. A lot of early settlers to the “big sky” country in Montana and the Great Plains went home after a few years because they couldn’t stand all that space; others found it gave them the sense of infinite possibility that Ford talks about in his interview. I have friends raised in cities who are acutely uncomfortable in rural areas, or going camping…and others who love it and who wouldn’t miss their annual trek to the Boundary Waters wilderness area.

That may seem obvious, but a writer has to think about it on three levels: the writer, the readers, and the characters.

Writers first need to be aware of their reaction to whatever landscape they’re using, and that others may not feel the same way, because without that awareness, it’s almost impossible to tweak what one is doing in the story, even if one knows that other people may not react the same way.

Next, the writer needs to think about whether their characters are similar or different – whether the wilderness the writer loves is something that his fussy scholar character would find untidy or even threatening, for instance. It’s also good to have different characters in a book have different reactions and comfort levels, even if those never quite come to the surface in obvious ways. The author may never explain why the London street-thief is wide awake in the woods all night while his companions, who’re used to camping out, snore away, but it’ll add to the characterization even if only on a subconscious level.

Finally, the writer needs to be aware that not all readers will react to a particular landscape the way the writer does. This means that the writer who sees “big sky” country as a land of infinite possibility may want to throw in a line or two somewhere to indicate this for readers who find that landscape agoraphobia-inducing, instead of just assuming that everybody who reads the story will get it because it is SO obvious. It’s obvious to the writer, but not necessarily to everyone else.

Yesterday, we went to the State Fair. Minnesota has a really, really amazing state fair, and it was actually cool enough in the morning that my cousin who had knee surgery last year and my father who is 92 and sensitive to high temperatures could both walk around all morning (and into the afternoon) without any real problems. We saw the butter heads and got milkshakes at the dairy barn, then went looking for the bacon ice cream (didn’t find it), had honey ice cream at the agricultural building in the section devote to bees (if you’re seeing a pattern here, I’m not surprised; yes, my Dad is very fond of ice cream). We saw the crop art, (which is made by gluing different seeds to a board…and it is amazing the fine detail some people can get that way), went through the Arts & Crafts building admiring the knitting (me), the quilting (my cousin), and the woodwork (my Dad, with my sister going “…and you can make me one of those, Dad, and one of those, and…”

We all admired the pirate ship done in folded paper, but agreed that it was too fragile to survive in any of our respective abodes. We went through the Fine Arts building, where the piece de resistance was a marble bust of a Native American in full feather headdress carved and polished with amazing care and attention to detail. Lunch at the Lutheran Evangelical kitchen (because you could sit down) and then we took the sky tram back to the bus. Yes, that wasn’t even half of what was available, and it took us about five hours and by then we were all bushed.

It did get me thinking, though. I’ve lived in Midwestern farm states all my life, and even though I’ve always lived in suburbs and my stomping grounds of choice have been urban, I’ve always been aware of the vast acreage of corn and soybeans and wheat outside the small area in which I circulate. When I was growing up in suburban Chicago, if you woke up too early and turned the radio on, you got the farm report, even if the rest of the day it was a music channel playing rock and roll, and even though they don’t do that any more, there’s still that awareness – you can’t listen to a weather report (even in a normal year when there’s no drought) without hearing a reference to soil moisture and how the rain or sun is going to affect the crops.

One of my sisters now lives on the coast of Maine. When I visit her, there’s a similar awareness, but it’s about the fishermen, how the fish and lobsters are doing, and how the weather and other trends will affect them. In Alabama, my sister and nieces there hear about hurricanes and the tornadoes they spawn, as well as regular updates on the condition of the Gulf of Mexico.

All of this stuff is almost subliminal, but it’s part of what gives each area of the country its own unique feel, even in major cities. It’s not just that the weather is different; it’s a sense that what people do for a living, the things that feed the city both literally and symbolically, are different. Even in metropolitan areas that are so enormous that some of that sense of being in touch with more rural areas seems to have been lost, there’s still a difference in the feel of the city. New York has Wall Street and Broadway, and Los Angeles has Disneyland and the film industry; you can’t tell me that doesn’t make any difference.

But I don’t see a lot of this in fantasy or science fiction, unless it’s in a story that’s set in a real-world city that the writer happens to love and have a feel for. Even with a real venue like Chicago or New York or L.A., a lot of writers seem to slap the name on a generic urban setting (it’s a big city; you can tell because it’s got skyscrapers, freeways, lots of traffic, lots of people living in generic apartment buildings, and maybe a couple of ethnic restaurants). There often isn’t much attention paid to major-but-strictly-local events like the Minnesota State Fair (heck, half the time there isn’t much attention paid to planet-wide events like elections or their version of Christmas or Independence Day. Lois Bujold’s Vorkosigan books have their Midwinter Festival and the Emperor’s birthday, but I’m drawing a blank for other examples).

And there especially isn’t a lot of attention paid to that subliminal awareness of the stuff that ought to make every planet, and a wide variety of specific areas of each planet, unique. When I visit my sister in Maine, she goes down to the docks and we have fresh lobster for dinner; when I visit my sister in Alabama, she makes southern shrimp boil; when I visit my friends in New York they take me to dozens of tiny, phenomenal restaurants (ethnic, fusion, traditional…world cuisine, sort of). In Chicago, the first place we stop is for the hot dogs at Hot Doug’s. I took my cousin and my Dad to the State Fair for honey ice cream and cheese curds and food-on-a-stick, and if it hadn’t been so hot during the early part of their visit, I’d have taken them to see Minnehaha Falls and the Minnesota zoo.

Where do your characters take their visiting friends to show off their town/planet? And what do they eat that can’t be had anywhere else?

The other big advantage they have is that they don’t seem to get as many fans asking about obscure worldbuilding points, some of which aren’t even in the story. I’ve never heard of someone coming up to a writer who has written a series of historical novels set in New York City during the American Revolution and asking “So, I’ve been wondering what was happening in Australia while all this was going on.” And if somebody did ask, I know of nobody who would think the writer out of line if he answered, “How should I know? Google is your friend…”

But when you’ve invented a world, readers do this sort of thing all the time. I still remember the fan letter I got from a gentleman who’d read The Seven Towers that went something like this:

“Dear Ms. Wrede: In your book, you mention the Three Greater Obligations and the Twelve Lesser Obligations. I can only find nine Lesser Obligations in the text. What are the other three? Sincerely yours,”

For those of you who haven’t read the book, the greater and lesser obligations were part of the culture of a secondary character, a foreigner who was the only member of his group who ever came onstage during the story (though we heard a lot about them). Since only the one character was actually in the book, I didn’t bother making up the culture in detail; when he brought up the Three Greater Obligations, I knew what they were because they were important to the situation, but when he mentioned the Twelve Lesser Obligations, I figured that was enough to cover anything that was likely to come up in the course of the book, and I didn’t actually need to have a list.

So when I got that fan letter, I didn’t have an answer. Which tends to surprise and annoy the sort of fan who so earnestly asks questions like that. For some reason, they’re positive that I have several sets of virtual encyclopedias, one for each of the imaginary worlds I’ve created, that cover everything anyone could possibly want to know about their history, geography, cultures, magic, and so on.

It doesn’t work that way for most of us. Yes, every so often you get a curve-wrecker like J.R.R. Tolkein who spent forty years inventing everything from languages to poetry for his imaginary world – but those people are nearly always doing it for fun. As a hobby. Because they like making up every possible detail of their imaginary world.

Most working writers don’t have that much time, not when we’re trying to make a living as writers rather than Oxford Dons, and especially not when we’re working with multiple different imaginary places. What we do instead is what I call the soap-bubble technique – we know a small number of key details, the sort that imply a lot of other interesting possibilities, and we scatter them through the story instead of giving them all to the reader at once. Like taking a drop of soapy water and blowing it full of air, this gives the illusion of a sizeable object much larger than the actual material that makes it up. There isn’t anything in the middle but air, but it doesn’t matter because the bubble is so pretty and it doesn’t actually have to last any longer than the story it’s background for.

Furthermore, some of the best and most important details in my books turn out to be things I made up on the fly. The interesting contradiction here is that I need to have put considerable thought into the background before I’m able to do that sort of on-the-fly invention…but most of it doesn’t have to be at the detail level. I need a structure that things have to fit into, so that everything I come up with stays consistent, but I don’t need all twelve of the Lesser Obligations, especially when I don’t plan on mentioning any of them specifically in the text.

Sometimes I do work out unnecessary extras, just for fun. When I was writing The Raven Ring, I worked out the entire fortunetelling deck of cards and their meanings, just because, even though I only needed ten or so cards in the actual text. I had an obscure secret history behind them, too, though none of it ever got into that book. But that was just because I was having fun, not because I had to know all that in order to write the book.

There’s one more factor involved in not-making-things-up besides the time and energy: the problem of being trapped, of needing something to be X in order for the plot to work, but it can’t be X because you’ve already made up Y. Not “you’ve already put Y in the book.” If the background gets too full of specific, interlocking, irrelevant detail, it can cripple one’s ability to suddenly see a completely different possibility…because the new thing isn’t a possibility; that part of the background is already filled in.

It’s a delicate balancing act. Every writer has a different threshold for how much detail is enough, how much is too much, how much has to be done in advance, how much can be made up as needed. Sometimes it changes from book to book. The point is, the threshold can change, because all a fantasy writer really has to worry about is internal consistency. True, most of us set our stories in worlds that have some vague connection with reality – that have horses and rabbits and laws of physics that are mostly like ours (except for the magic part). Where there’s overlap, one does research. But there’s always the possibility of something different – there don’t have to be horses or rabbits or the laws of physics as we know them.

And possibility is, for me, what writing in general and fantasy in particular are all about.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there” – L.P. Hartley

 One of the tricky aspects of writing books set in any vaguely recognizable version of history is the inevitable clash between now and then, on pretty much every level. There are an enormous number of things that most people know or believe in the present day – the earth moves around the sun, tomatoes are not an aphrodisiac, flossing is important, recycling is desireable, smoking cigarettes causes cancer - that people did not know or believe at various points in the past.

Any writer who goes poking around even a little way into the past will quickly run into attitudes and beliefs that are very, very different from the ones we hold today. And when the beliefs and attitudes of the past clash with modern values, the writer is immediately faced with a dilemma: Does she portray the past accurately, and take the chance that her central characters will be less likeable and sympathetic (or perhaps that they’ll be actively offensive) because they have attitudes that are consistent with their own time rather than ours? Does she “fix” things by giving at least her main characters more modern, more enlightened attitudes and beliefs that no one in that time period would hold? Or does she just ignore any differences and present what is essentially a modern novel with the characters in funny clothes?

Different writers answer these questions in different ways, depending on what things they think are most important. An example: Some years back, I read a novel set in England around 1810. One of the central characters was clearly a full-blown alcoholic, resulting in a good many difficulties for him and his family (as one might expect). Then, in mid-book, the character hit bottom and essentially invented the entire Alcoholics Anonymous twelve step program (though he didn’t call it that) and then worked his way through it, with support from his family and friends.

To me, this story was problematic to the point of being a wall-flinger, because the twelve step program (and the modern attitude toward drinking, drunkenness, and alcoholism) is an anachronism in 1810, especially in England, and the author clearly did not mean the story as an alternate history of any kind. The author of this particular book, however, obviously felt that portraying alcoholism and recovery accurately (according to the modern understanding of this condition) was much more important than being historically accurate.

Had I been writing this book, I would not have made the same choices. But that’s me, and it wasn’t my story. I’m not saying the author was wrong to make the choice she did; I’m saying that the result was a book that I, personally, didn’t like much, won’t reread, and wouldn’t recommend.

BUT – there are other readers who love the book, some of them for the same reasons that I dislike it. They place a greater importance on having their fiction reflect modern values, understanding, and culture than on having those things be historically accurate. And I am okay with that, so long as those readers (and especially writers) know exactly what they are doing (and don’t try to pretend that those stories are historically accurate when they aren’t).

What I am not okay with are the writers who don’t bother even trying to understand the periods they use as settings. The author I mentioned above obviously knew that there was no Alcoholics Anonymous program in England in 1810; equally obviously, she made a deliberate, conscious choice to have her character come up with the twelve steps so that he could work his way through them and begin to recover, and she put some effort into making her characters’ actions plausible. I didn’t buy it, myself, but at least she didn’t have one of the other characters say “Look, why don’t you come to an AA meeting with me tonight?” in London in 1810.

Unfortunately, there are too many writers who do just that sort of thing. Sometimes it’s a relatively minor and innocent gaffe, like the Victorian-era “historical” that had characters taking showers; sometimes it’s a more fundamental lack of research; sometimes it’s complete and utter cluelessness of the sort that simply cannot imagine a world without cell phones or the Internet. The result, though is that the writer portrays the past as if it was exactly like the present, only with different fashions and horses instead of cars.

That carelessness is where I draw the line between I-don’t-like-it-but-it’s-your-choice and don’t-do-this-just-don’t. Because I agree with George Santayana that “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it,” and pretending that the past was exactly like the present is the first step in forgetting the parts that we need to remember. Even (or especially) if they’re parts we don’t like.

Specifically, as the basic building blocks of story, the Big Three are the source of a whole lot of problems, flaws, and frustrations for writers. Nearly every writer I know has had problems with one or more of them, at one time or another. Most writers don’t seem to have any problem picking out which one of the three they’re best (or worst) at. Most readers, if you get them thinking even for a short while, will unhesitatingly point to one of the three as being the strong suit of each favorite writer on their bookshelf.

I’d say that for me, my strongest suit is plot. Yes, I put a lot of work into the twists and turns, but it’s fun work; it’s easy; it’s nothing I break my brains over. I don’t find myself avoiding writing a scene because there’s a plot twist coming up that I’m uncertain about, and I have no hesitation at all about letting something come up unexpectedly during the writing process that I know will alter all my plot plans, because I’m confident that I can make it work out, one way or another.

Setting comes second for me. I think I’m good at settings, but they don’t come quite as naturally to me as plots. I put a lot of work in here, too, but I always seem to miss something crucial, and I’m always fighting the low-level fear that I’ve missed something that ought to be obvious, or that I’ve contradicted myself by saying in one spot that dragons are vegetarians and then showing a dragon happily chowing down a cow in another. (Note to self: Cows are not vegetables.) I’m always much too aware of all the research I haven’t done.

Characters are the area I’ve always felt were my weakest point. Yes, really. Some of that is a process thing. With plot and setting, I can make lists of the things that I need to put in (see Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions), and charts of the way things have to go to get to the end. I can draw maps. I can write reams of “history” that will never actually get into the story. Plot and setting, I understand, and if I don’t, I can usually analyze them and figure them out.

But characters are people. I don’t understand real-life people very well, not even the ones I’ve known for fifty-odd years. I feel that I have a better understanding of fictional characters, but it’s all on a gut-level. Making lists doesn’t help. Well, maybe with a character’s personal appearance (brown eyes, black hair, medium height, scar on elbow…). But when it comes to a character’s personality, I’m always working on instinct, and it’s taken me years to get to the point where I have some of the same kind of trust in my character-instinct that I have in my plot- and setting-instincts.

This is not a bad thing, nor a good one; it’s just how my process works. The point here is that I’ve known for a very long time that characterization was my weakest point … and that means that I always have something to work on when I’m up for working at improving my writing. This is not to say that I always put “work on characters” front and center – I found it much easier, especially at the beginning of my career, to start by working at techniques I didn’t know how to use. Like dialog tags and point of view and flashbacks.

But ever since I recognized characters as my main weakness, “work on characterization” has always been at least in the number two working-on-this position. The Seven Towers – work on alternating viewpoints; work on characters. The Harp of Imach Thyssel – work on multiple viewpoints; work on characters. Like that.

I have learned a lot this way, and I am still learning. I recommend it to your attention.

This is one of those too-obvious-to-mention things that a lot of writers seem to forget on occasion. In at least some cases, I think the cause is related to the intensely media-heavy world we live in – when one is used to seeing what everything looks like, all at once, the way one does in a movie or a picture, it can be difficult to slow down and describe things one at a time, the way one must when one is working with words and sentences and paragraphs. In other cases, I suspect the problem is that the author is so familiar with the setting that, for them, one word or a short phrase is enough to evoke it: “Chicago,” “New York,” “D.C.” In still other cases, the author is so afraid of making a mistake that they leave out everything that is not absolutely essential, resulting in a story where they characters might as well be wandering around in a thick gray fog.  And sometimes, the author wants to use a setting that is imaginary, or at least unfamiliar to them, but they’re too busy or in too much of a hurry to do the work of making or looking it up in as much depth as they need.

Yet setting is something that affects nearly every aspect of a story, one way or another. Accurate portrayals of a real-life place will please or delight readers who are familiar with that place already, and often impress readers who haven’t yet been there. The first time I saw the movie “The Sting” (set in Chicago in the 1930s), I was utterly delighted by the fact that periodically there would be this loud rumbling and all of the characters would have to stop talking for a minute. I’d never seen anything set in Chicago that included the effect of the El on conversation (the El = elevated trains – that’s what made the rumbling). My first real job, the summer after high school, was a block from the El, and that’s exactly what happened.

There are two parts to writing a setting, whether it’s a real place or an imaginary one: 1) Putting in the key things that make this place different from any other, and 2) Not putting in anything that doesn’t fit. This applies to both on-stage and off-stage settings. (By “off-stage setting” I mean any places that affect the characters or story that aren’t actually shown. For instance, if your story takes place in San Diego, but one of the characters grew up in Wisconsin, that character had better have seen snow and know about tornado sirens and the wind chill factor. You don’t have to mention those details specifically unless they’re important to the story, but that Wisconsin-raised character had better not look ignorant or surprised if the subject of snow comes up.)

The key things that you put into your descriptions will differ from story to story. If a character works or shops in the Loop in downtown Chicago, the El and its effects are probably worth mentioning (especially if they’re working in an older building without modern sound-proofing). If they work four or five blocks from the train lines and shop in the suburban malls, not so much. It’s seldom worth making a point of the odd ways Chicagoans have of pronouncing certain street names (Devon as de-VOHN, for instance), but if one needs a quick way of showing that someone is from out-of-town, it could work.

Not putting in stuff that doesn’t fit is just as important, and this is where the writer has to really be aware of his/her assumptions. If all you know is the climate and geography of the mid-continental plains, and you’re writing about mountains or the coast, or in some cases even forests, you want to do a bunch of research and maybe even get some things checked out by friends who live in places like the ones you’re writing about. A San Diego native who does NOT have trouble adjusting to his first winter in Winnepeg isn’t going to be any more believable than the Wisconsin guy who has never heard of wind chill.

And all of this is strongly affected by the viewpoint and viewpoint character you’re using. An omniscient viewpoint can describe whatever the author wants, however he wants. In a tight-third-person or first-person viewpoint, it will break the viewpoint if the author describes things the viewpoint character can’t see, doesn’t know, or doesn’t care about. The Frontier Magic series I’m working on doesn’t have a lot of physical description of places or people, and it drives some of my readers crazy. But the memoir form I’m using for those books isn’t suited to much description, and Eff isn’t the sort to describe things she’s really familiar with (and the one time I did it, the editor very wisely cut that paragraph). The point is, I still have to know what all those things she doesn’t describe actually look like, so that when I get a chance to slip something in, I can slip in the right thing.

There are actually several answers to this question, depending on what sort of fantasy one wants to write. In modern urban fantasy or magical realism, for instance, everything in the story except the magical/fantastical elements needs to be realistic, because the story is taking place in a recognizable version of the real world where most of the background is the same as in real life. For most modern urban fantasy, the magical elements have to fit in the cracks as a secret that is unknown and unaccepted by the general public. For magical realism, the fantastical elements are simply assumed and generally accepted by the characters as how the real world works…but everything that’s not fantastical has to be realistic (that’s the “realism” part of this fantasy subtype).

In an AU (alternate universe) story, whether modern or historical, the writer has a lot more flexibility. The society can look very much like ours, only with an elf emancipation movement or forensic magicians. Alternatively, the setting can substitute magic for technology: flying carpets or dragons instead of airplanes, cooling spells instead of refrigerators, but a history that is more or less the same as in real life, resulting in a political and social landscape that is very similar to ours. On yet another hand, the writer can attempt a rigorous working-out of the political/historical effects of having working magic and/or magical creatures, depending on whatever departure point the writer decides to use for the historical discovery of reliable working magic. At the farthest end of the continuum are the stories in which nothing is the same except the geography, the assumption being that if magic worked, all of history would be completely different.

In a surreal or dreamscape fantasy, such as Alice in Wonderland, all bets are off, unless the writer decides otherwise. As long as what the writer is doing fits the “feel” of the story, mirrors and mice can recite poetry, chess pieces and playing cards can behave like people (rather strange people, but still people), cats can vanish and reappear at will (OK, not so much of a stretch, really), and so on. Very little resemblance to mimetic or realistic fiction is required.

The key element for all types of fantasy is internal consistency. If you say in Chapter 2 that vampires cannot bear the smell of garlic, you’d better not send them out to dinner at a trendy Italian restaurant that serves roast garlic as an appetizer in Chapter 10, and you’d really better not have them suddenly develop a garlic craving in Chapter 15. Not without a lot of explanation, anyway. If you establish early on that wizards cannot work with fire in any form, you’d better not have your wizard-hero throwing fireballs around later in the book, unless the whole point of the story has been for him to find out the secret of working with fire. In other words, in fantasy fiction, you get to make the rules for how the world works…but once you’ve made them, you have to follow them, or you’ll lose a large chunk of your readers.

External consistency is also important in fantasy, but for a different reason: most experienced fantasy readers will assume that any inconsistencies between the real world and the background in a piece of fantasy fiction are deliberate, conscious choices that the author has made, and therefore clues both to the type of fantasy and to the way the author’s particular fantasy world works. If the writer pays no attention at all to “real things” (like the way guns work, or how far a horse can travel in a day), accidental mistakes can result in book-meets-wall moments.

5 brownie points to anyone who can identify where I got some of the examples in Paragraph 3.

So pretend you’ve spent so much time on something that you’ve got gobs and gobs of backstory and little trivial details, like the MC is  terminally left handed or her brother has to organize his pens in a very specific way or their uncle won the very first US Open. These things have nothing to do with the plot but add humanizing quirks to the characters that would make them so much more interesting in real life. How do you find the balance of details without hitting overload?

I will begin by pointing out that this is a problem faced to a far greater degree by every writer who writes nonfiction, reasonably accurate and well-grounded historical fiction, AU, or even fiction with a modern setting that the writer expects many readers to be unfamiliar with. The real world is full of WAY too many interesting details for any writer to fit all of them into a book. Even the Encyclopedia Britannica gets edited.

To me, the problem doesn’t seem to be the presence of all those interesting details; no, the real problem is the degree of attachment the writer feels to them, whether they’ve come from the writer’s imagination or from tons of research. We joke about the writers who seem to be thinking “I’ve suffered for my art by doing all this research; now I’m going to make the reader suffer, too” but really, writers are much more like geeks – “But this detail is SO COOL, how can I leave it out?” Too often, the end result is a lot of cool information that doesn’t belong in the story – hence the oft-quoted advice to “murder your darlings.”

Unfortunately, as with everything else in writing, there are no hard-and-fast rules for determining what the “right” level of detail is for backstory. It depends on the story, the writer, the style, the conceit of the book, and so on. A lot of it is practice and instinct (at least for me; if there are folks out there who use some other method, do please comment!). If your style is modeled on Hemingway, you probably won’t have as much description (and therefore you will include fewer details) than if your style is more like E.R. Eddison.  

However (there’s always a “however” when I’m doing one of these) there are a few things you can and should consider. First and foremost is the question “How does this background detail affect the way the character acts or thinks?”

If your main character is terminally left-handed, that’s going to affect how she does just about everything physical, even if it’s only in small ways. Her left-handedness is going to affect nearly everything she does with her hands, from how she opens a door to smearing the ink when she’s in a hurry writing a note. You don’t just drop the information into the story in one place and forget about it; if it’s a real detail (rather than mere window-dressing), it will  be an important consideration whenever you describe her actions, all through the story.

The second question I’d suggest is “How does this detail affect other characters?” If the brother organizes his pens in a certain way, it’s going to make it easier or harder for his sister (or friends) to find something to write with when they need it in a hurry (and it’ll give siblings and friends something to tease him about, if they’re so inclined). Again, it’s something that will likely come up naturally in the course of the story, rather than something you have to figure out how to include.

What this all adds up to is the question “Is this detail important to the story?” “Important” does not mean it has to be a plot-point. Really, “important” only means that you aren’t cramming this thing into the story just because you know it. If nobody in the story is interested in golf or fame or family small-talk or sports history, there may be no reason for that US Open winner ever to come up. If one of those things does happen, then maybe that detail will come up, and the story will be richer for it…but if you manufacture such a conversation just to get that interesting detail in, it will very likely weaken the story.

Writers almost always know far more about their characters, the backstory, and the setting than ever belongs in a book or story. If you are determined to make sure the reader knows everything, you can try offering your eventual publisher some appendices…but don’t be surprised if they don’t want them.