There are three different areas a writer has to consider when thinking about how people in a completely different place and time would talk: what to call things, what sort of slang and idioms people use, and what sort of technical jargon each of the characters could/would/should slip into their dialog.

The first is the naming of names – that is, what to call various common objects that the reader will be unfamiliar with. In most SF, the things are unfamiliar because they’re things that haven’t been invented yet, or things that come from other planets or alien societies; in medieval fantasy, they’re unfamiliar either because most people no longer have experience with a wide variety of formerly-common things and activities, from sailing a tall ship to shearing a sheep, or because the things are imaginary (like the spices the dwarves use or the herbs the elves grow).

The real things, like the parts of a harness or the names of the different sails on a schooner, the writer can find out from research. The imaginary ones need to “sound real,” and that means considering what the thing is, what it’s used for, where it came from, and possibly who invented it and when. Regardless of what something is originally named, if it’s a common everyday item that’s in constant use, the name will eventually get shortened to something easy to say: television to TV, telephone to phone, automobile to car. Names of existing items can get transferred to new ones – “notebook” is both a shorter form of “notebook computer” and a repurposing of the word that used to mean “blank pages bound in a cover to jot things down in.”

Who invented and named it is also relevant. Anything that came out of a big corporate research program will have had oodles of marketing people involved in making up the name, the way drugs and new car models do. Hybrid vegetables and fruits are often given portmanteau names like limequat, or variations on one of the names they started with, like broccolini. Things that were developed or invented in another culture sometimes keep their original name; other times, the name will be adapted, or something will be completely renamed.

The second thing to consider is slang and speech patterns. Anyone who’s read Chaucer can see how syntax and word choice have changed in the past 900 years or so; there’s no reason to think that similar changes won’t take place in the next 900. The problem is indicating those changes without turning one’s story into a language class project. Slang changes constantly and comes from many, many sources: abbreviations, portmanteau words, repurposed words, words and phrases borrowed from other languages, acronyms, etc. To give a plausible-seeming impression of future slang, a writer needs to use all of these possible sources, not just one (which was what my friend was complaining about in the book she’d read).

The other thing to consider is that unless the writer is doing very near-future SF, there will have been lots of slang and lots of idioms that have come along in the interim, and some of them will have stuck. We still talk about “reining in” someone who’s out of control, even though horses haven’t been part of daily life for nearly a century. If the only slang and idioms your far-future people use are a) those current in the far future and b) those that stuck around from 2013, it’s going to look a little odd. Similarly, if your medieval peasants are talking about not having the bandwidth for that, or even about telegraphing a punch, some readers will not be happy, but if the elves have interesting archery-slang and nature idioms, lots of people will be very happy indeed.

The third thing to think about, language wise, is whatever specialized jargon would be plausible for your specific characters to use. This comes in two varieties: terms that were once specialized to a particular field, but which have become commonplace so that everyone uses them; and terms that are still specific to a particular field that one of your characters is expert in.

The first sort of jargon is stuff that any of your characters might use, because it’s commonplace in whatever time you’ve set your story. “Laser” was, in the 1950s, a specialized acronym that hardly anyone besides physicists and SF fans had heard of; “byte” was, in the early 1980s, a term only computer geeks understood. In a story set in 2013 or later, it would be perfectly reasonable for pretty much any character to use them. On the other hand, unless one of your characters is a blacksmith, there’s probably not going to be a lot of need for anyone to list the names or uses of every hammer lying around the forge, and the whole reason Scotty can get away with all that engineering doubletalk about dilithium crystals is that nobody expects anyone to understand the jargon anyway.

Once you’ve thought about all this stuff and made up a rich linguistic stew for your characters to speak…think about dialing it back. Once in a while, somebody gets away with a book like Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange or Norman Spinrad’s The Void Captain’s Tale, but most of the time, it’s more effective to use a much lighter hand so that readers won’t get distracted by having to learn new syntax and slang and names and specialist jargon in every single sentence. A book that has to be decoded is seldom a fast read. Sometimes it’s worth the effort, and sometimes the story demands it, but be very sure it does (and that you can pull it off) if you’re going to try what is essential a whole new dialect that will be completely unfamiliar to every last one of your readers (because you made it up).

On the other hand, if you can make it work, it’s a heck of a lot of fun and a terrific tour de force. And if it works, fine.

For the iceberg worldbuilders, there’s a whole lot of information underlying the stuff that actually gets into the story. What the reader sees is the 10% of the iceberg that sticks out of the water, but the writer has come up with a ton of supplementary supporting detail – politics, maps, languages, music, clothing design, law, culture and customs, and on and on. All this gives the imaginary world a tremendous solidity and consistency, because the writer has all this stuff to draw on…and the writers who do this usually spend an enormous amount of time researching and doing their best to make sure that everything ties together.

One such writer I know took advantage of living near a university to get input on his design. He started with the astronomy department, where he found an interested grad student who helped out with designing the star system, other planets and moons, and the composition of the planet’s crust. Then he went to the geology department, where he figured out the tectonic plates and mineral deposits; geography for mountains, lakes and rivers; agriculture for crops, and so on. As I recall, he ran aground in the climatology department – they were happy to point out basic climate zones, but when he asked about weather, they said “We don’t know enough; just make it up.”

Soap-bubble worldbuilders take a different approach. They’re all about illusion – they invent broad swath of interesting detail that’s shiny, hangs together, and implies a lot of history and culture and so on, but which has no more substance behind it than the air that fills a soap bubble. Everything is consistent and plausible on the surface, but surface is all that’s really there.

The advantage of the soap-bubble method is that there’s lots of room to make up useful background whenever the story happens to need it. The disadvantage is that the writer has to fit any new information in around whatever has already been established, or risk the reader losing their suspension of disbelief.

Note that soap-bubble worldbuilders are not necessarily just making things up as they go along. All the ones I know invent quite a lot of their settings before they ever start writing; they just aren’t going into nearly as much depth as the iceberg worldbuilders. What they all seem to have in common is a strong sense of what their setting is like. They will make up a really cool detail and then sigh and say “Yes, it’s cool, but it doesn’t belong in this world” even if there is nothing specific in their worldbuilding-to-date that would make that detail not-work. Sometimes, writers who absolutely cannot do any pre-planning in regard to plot or characters can quite happily do extensive worldbuilding in advance of sitting down to write.

When soap-bubble worldbuilders write long, multi-book series, either their worldbuilding starts to break down, or they become inadvertent iceberg worldbuilders as they accumulate more and more background that doesn’t actually need to be put in the next book. It’s very difficult to keep track of all the random details one has to make up for even one novel, even if one already has a lot of underwater background; it gets harder and harder as a series progresses. It’s easy to overload the soap bubble – to give just one or two bits of information that don’t quite fit with what’s already been said, so that the whole structure collapses. It’s the equivalent of blowing a little too much air into the bubble and popping it.

Iceberg worldbuilders have an easier time going on for multiple books without the worldbuilding collapsing, though if there was an unnoticed flaw in the initial underlying structure, it’s likely to be stressed under the weight of carrying more and more novels, until it either melts down or fractures. It is extremely difficult, in my experience, to come up with a fix for a worldbuilding mistake that will work retroactively, though it can sometimes be done.

The good news is that anyone who has a five or seven or ten-book series almost certainly has enough rabid fans to keep things going for quite a while longer, even if the worldbuilding is starting to show signs of problems. The bad news is that a writer whose worldbuilding is starting to break down is likely to be really bothered by it, to the point of having difficulty continuing (unless the writer really doesn’t care about consistency and believability at that level, in which case the breakdown probably occurs sooner rather than later because the writer didn’t put any effort into worldbuilding in the first place).

Whatever method one prefers, it’s well worth putting time into worldbuilding. Holes in the setting/world often translate into holes in the plot, and if the background is recognizable (i.e., real or based closely on somewhere/somewhen real), holes in the worldbuilding frequently mean that anyone familiar with that time/place will reject the story as implausible or unrealistic even if the story is a complete fantasy. Maintaining the reader’s belief in the story is important to every kind of fiction; consistent and believable backgrounds are a key ingredient in doing that.

Since the immediate-background stuff usually comes up in the story, a lot of writers can just make it up on the fly. I find that I’m better off at least thinking about some of it in advance, because if I wait until two of my characters are introduced to each other in Chapter Three, I’ll probably have them bow or shake hands just because that’s my default and I want to get on with the scene. If I make it up ahead of time, I’m more likely to take a few minutes to come up with a formal greeting that reflects the culture I’ve invented.

Which brings me to the other other kind of worldbuilding, the kind that every writer does to some extent, and that’s the kind that’s done in the story itself. It’s not about inventing the cool details and clever twists on history; it’s about conveying a sense of place and culture and background to the reader.

There are three things to look at when thinking about this sort of worldbuilding:

1. How familiar is the place/time/culture to your expected readers?
2. How much does your story depend on unique features of the place/time/culture in which it is set?
3. How much would your story be enriched by including unique features of the place/time/culture in which it is set?

1. A lot of present-day fiction is set in Generic City or Generic Town, Writer’s Home Country, because the writer quite reasonably expects the story to be published in his country, and they’ll all know how things work there. Also, if you set a story in a place, time, or culture that you have no experience of, you will have to do research to get it right, and let’s face it, generic is easier.

The farther you get from the place, time, and culture your readers live in, the more worldbuilding your story has to offer them if you want it to feel as if it really is in a different place, time, or culture. Chicago is not L.A. is not New Orleans is not New York is not Miami…and those are all major cities in the same country. The farther out you branch, the greater the differences; Paris is a lot more not-Moscow and not-Beijing than New York is not-Chicago, and Paris in 2013 is not Paris in 1968 or 1798 or 52 BCE.

2. This ought to be a no-brainer; after all, anything that the story depends on needs to be in the book, right? When a story is based in a real place, time, or culture, though, some writers forget that they can’t leave out a critical bit of information just because their readers can google on the meaning of cranes in Japanese culture. Worse are the folks who presume that if they can rattle off a list of every type of hobgoblin in the British Isles, all of their readers will know all about them as well.

3. The first two points aim the writer at things that really need to be in the story; this one is for looking at the things that are optional. Every place has things about it that are unique, or groups of non-unique things that add together into a unique “feel.” A story may not need to be set anywhere more specific than Generic Metropolitan Area, but speaking as a Chicago ex-pat, there’s something special about books set in Chicago that capture the feel of the place. It may not matter to the story that the El (elevated train, for non-Chicagoans) is really, really noisy, but I get a warm fuzzy feeling when the characters in a Chicago story have to stop talking in mid-conversation every so often while the El rattles by.

And that brings me to the how part of the post. A lot of writers seem to think of worldbuilding as description: what things are there, what they look and feel and sound like. But places, times, and cultures are – or should be – a lot more than a painted backdrop that you can unroll behind your characters as they move through the story. Good description is certainly part of worldbuilding, but if you really want your readers to get into your world, you have to give them more than a handful of local placenames and a vivid description of the harbor/town square/other big tourist attraction.

Every aspect of the story is part of the worldbuilding on some level, from what the characters have for lunch to the style and type of clothing they (and others) wear to their manners when they’re greeting someone to things like having to stop in mid-conversation to let a noisy train go past. The particular piece of the world we live in affects every aspect of our lives, all the time, but we take it so much for granted that we don’t often think about how. My sister in Alabama does not have the January Reflex where you automatically take your shoes off just inside someone’s door, because where she lives, she a) does not have to wear snow boots in January, and b) does not come in with shoes covered in ice-melter and dirty snow that will track over two rooms, minimum, if you forget to take them off.

Worldbuilding in a story is remembering to include all those little things, from the vitally important social aspects (whether that means remembering to curtsey to the king and bow to the queen, never vice versa, or whether it means always stirring your tea clockwise) to the everyday things like swapping your shoes for an “indoor pair,” or opening/closing all the windows at particular times of day because of the temperature.

It’s the way living in a place affects the everyday lives of the characters down in the details. How many details are too many is a matter of taste; some authors go for lots of lush description of everything, even making breakfast, while others go for bare-bones Hemingway-esque sketches. One way or another, though, the world is always there in the story…because stories need a place to happen in as much as they need a problem to be about.

This is complicated by the fact that one of my best friends and story-noodlers is highly character-centered and dislikes having to make up much/any deep background in advance of the story. So her noodling questions have all been focused on the characters and plot (because she knows I do plot), which sometimes hits the “deep worldbuilding” button, but mostly doesn’t.

What I mean by “deep worldbuilding” is all the background, from geography to cultural history, that shapes the place and time the characters are living in. When I’m writing alternate history, I have many libraries’ worth of information to use or choose not to use. I can look up where the rivers and active volcanoes are, or where certain crops originated; I have the Han Dynasty, the Egyptian Pharaohs, and the Greco-Roman Empire that can be assumed with all their real-life consequences, or tinkered with, or eliminated with all those consequences (what if the rulers of the Indian subcontinent had chased Alexander back home and conquered Greece? Or Cleopatra had managed to annex Rome, instead of Rome getting Egypt?). Even if I made the world unrecognizable save for the geography (because, oh, aliens messed around with life on Earth at the end of the Mesozoic Era, so we have civilized dinosaurs instead of us), I’d know where the mountains and rivers were, and what the climate was like in various places, and so on.

But the New Thing isn’t alternate history in any way, shape, or form. Bits of it are modeled on Real Life History, but it’s more like visiting a museum exhibit of Michelangelo’s work and then coming home and trying to build a Cubist version of the Pieta out of cardboard boxes than it is like a mash-up of actual places and events.

Doing a lot of deep worldbuilding in advance is not for every writer, but it helps me. In fact, as has become quite clearly obvious, I need to know a fair amount of it, or I can’t get things to hang together properly at the immediate-backstory stage. That doesn’t mean I do all the deep worldbuilding at once; on the contrary, it develops in fits and starts, forwards and backwards. That is, sometimes I know something (like “this is a coastal city”) that implies a bunch of other things (a harbor, trade, seafood dishes). Other times, I know something (there are three distinct and mutually exclusive types of magic) and it begs a question (how were they discovered, and why do they have more-or-less equal status and emphasis?). The answer to that (three major empires back in their early history, each with a different attitude/philosophy toward What Man Is Allowed To Tamper With) implies some more things (my city must be somewhere that was either not directly influenced by any of the empires, or influenced equally by all of them, there are going to be at least some people who still have very strong opinions about whether each type of magic is good/bad).

I like the idea of a trade crossroads at some point in the middle of my three empires, which fits with the harbor-and-trade part I established earlier, but it might be inconvenient. I’ve already got a three-way magical conflict; do I really want a three-way philosophical and political conflict as well? Even if it ends up being just the historical remnants of the empires that my present-day people have to deal with? On the other hand, can I really avoid it, given what I have so far for background, even if I stick the city far away?

If I make the location somewhere well away from the ancient empires, then it’ll need to have some local resource that’s valuable enough to stimulate trade with all three, but not so valuable that any of the empires would come all the way out there and conquer the place to get it. So not iron or gold, but maybe silk or purple dye or porcelain. That will probably also affect their trade and lifestyle during the period of the story, and possibly the prosperity of the city, depending on whether said trade item is still in demand or has been made obsolete by some new invention or discovery.

There’s also the question of when and how those empires collapsed. Rot from within and barbarians from without, like Rome? War, leading to mutual exhaustion? Plague? Is any of that still a danger? And what’s left of them – a handful of more-or-less equal countries, or some small new places trying to expand into the decaying core of the original empire? I don’t plan on getting into lots of geopolitics in this story, but if my city is a trade center, what’s going on in it will be of interest to the rest of the world, and vice versa. Also, at least one of my characters is from away, so I’ll need to have her place-of-origin developed more than just “up north.”

Then there’s the city government (is it a charter city, like London, with a mayor and aldermen, but still answerable to the king? Or a city-state run by its own prince or council?), what the local factions are (besides my three kinds of mages), and a bunch of cultural stuff, especially cultural stuff revolving around clothes (because my main character is a seamstress).

Which brings in the question of what fabrics and decorations are available, and whether they’re produced locally (they don’t have to be; it’s a trade center, after all), which ones are expensive luxuries and which are the working-class wear, whether or not there are sumptuary laws. I know that unicorn leather is banned, but do they feel the same way about anything else?

I know there are at least some magical creatures in this world – fairies of the small-butterfly sort and unicorns, at minimum – so I need to know whether or not they’re intelligent and/or have their own magic, how different cultures treat them, and how the inevitable conflicts in attitude will get handled in this particular place. Possibly also how they’ll be handled in other places, if I end up with more characters who are From Away or who have traveled widely.

Many of these things, when I get them fully developed, won’t get into the story directly, but they’ll affect it profoundly because the historical and cultural cross-currents affect almost everything in the story. This is particularly frustrating for my story-noodler, because every time another bit of background clunks solidly into place, part of the plot changes, and she’s not used to it because I haven’t done this for the last eight or ten books. Also, because she doesn’t need to do as much of it, or not in advance anyway.

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?

One of the interesting things this year was that there were three (!) panels on worldbuilding, and that’s not counting the ones on specific bits of worldbuilding, like the panel on “Designing a Magic System.” I was on the third panel, “The Joy of Worldbuilding,” which suffered a bit, I think, from being at the end of the run of panels on the topic. Nevertheless, we had a good crowd, and that tells me something about the interest of readers and writers in the topic, especially since they’d already had (potentially) at least three related panels in the previous twenty-four hours.

The topic was supposed to be about the sheer fun of worldbuilding for its own sake, but the discussion drifted (as such things are wont to do). What I ended up taking away from it was neither a list of recommended books (though there were quite a lot on display), nor tips and tricks for doing worldbuilding (though a few of those ran by as well), but a number of thoughts about process and utility.

For at least some fans and writers, inventing a coherent, consistent imaginary world is immense fun. Yes, even doing the math-and-science bits (sometimes especially the math-and-science bits). Yes, even when you know perfectly well that 99.9% of your readers are never going to notice that the orbital mechanics of the space station or the plate tectonics of the land masses are right (as far as scientific theory as of the copy-edit date knows). Yes, even when it’s a totally-imaginary fantasy world and the notion that there even are plate tectonics or fossils is never even going to occur to them. Getting it right, making it work within the rules-as-we-know-them is fun. So is making up a bunch of one’s own rules and then figuring out as many ramifications as possible.

In spite of the fun and the intellectual puzzle aspects of it, worldbuilding for its own sake has a bit of a bad rap in an awful lot of fan communities. I think that this is because so very many fans want (or think they want) to be writers, and worldbuilding is perceived as both a vital necessity for writing science fiction or fantasy and as a snare that can easily sidetrack the would-be writer into spending years doing worldbuilding instead of producing stories.

What people forget is that J. R. R. Tolkein spent forty years working on the worldbuilding for Middle Earth…for fun. Yes, eventually The Lord of the Rings came out of it, but the goal, at the start, wasn’t to write a bestselling fantasy. The goal was to make up some cool languages and then some neat people/elves/dwarves/ents/hobbits/etc. to speak the languages and then some poetry and history and cultures for the neat people/elves/etc. The story came last, almost as an afterthought.

In other words, worldbuilding does not have to have a utilitarian purpose in order to justify doing it. If one’s goal is to write a novel, well, then, yes, one does need to do some worldbuilding, whether one enjoys it or not, and one does have to be a bit careful that if one enjoys it, one doesn’t get too distracted from the ultimate goal (writing the novel). But if one just wants to have fun making stuff up…why not? You don’t have to be a writer to enjoy constructing an imaginary place.

The other point is a process one. We had two writers on that panel, and we represented the opposite ends of the worldbuilding process. I need to have a certain (fairly significant) amount of the worldbuilding done in advance in order to keep my story and my characters in line and everything consistent. I didn’t need to make up every single magical creature on the Great Plains in Frontier Magic (though I did make up quite a few), but I did have to know that I wanted an entire magical ecology that existed simultaneously with the non-magical, real-life one…which meant making sure that I talked about magical plants and insects and birds as well as things like dragons that you’d expect to find in a fantasy. I need a fair bit of foundation laid before I start working on the story, even if I don’t actually use most of it.

In contrast, the other writer on the panel apparently did much of his worldbuilding as needed during the writing of the story. I have a good friend who works similarly; where I need the structure and foundation to keep things in line, she needs the freedom to come up with an emergency escape detail on the fly that can get her characters out of a sticky situation. I don’t recall her actually having to do this, any more than I actually use the specific details I come up with in advance, but just as having a foundation is necessary to my process, being unrestricted and able to make up details is necessary to hers.

The last thing about worldbuilding is that we use the word in two different ways. On the one hand “worldbuilding” is that pre-writing or hobby-like invention of a coherent imaginary place, in as much detail (or lack thereof) as the inventor happens to want or need. It’s independent of story, just as real-life places exist independent of the people that live in them and the things that happen in them. On the other hand, there’s the worldbuilding that takes place within the story – the accumulation of details and bits of description and information that the characters find out about the history of the place(s) they move through, all of which creates an image of the world in which the story takes place. This kind of worldbuilding is a writing and storytelling technique, and it applies as much to modern mimetic fiction as it does to the most surreal of fantasies. The existence of real-life New York, Capetown, or Bombay does not make it easier to convey a sense of them to a reader than it is to evoke the feel of an imaginary place like Hobbiton or Edoras.

It’s the second kind of worldbuilding – the in-story techniques for conveying the look and feel of a place, whether real or imaginary – that is vital to fantasy and science fiction. The pre-writing make-it-up sort of worldbuilding is optional, depending on one’s personal process.

I’m in Tulsa at the moment, at the Nimrod conference, and yesterday they had me do a session on using history in fantasy. It’s kind of a broad topic, and most of it ended up being Q&A, but I did end up with a few points I thought I’d share.

I break down history-in-fantasy into several categories. The first is what’s referred to as “Secret History,” or what I call “fantasy in the cracks.” this is the kind of story that starts from the assumption that everything we know (or think we know) about real-life history is true…but only as far as it goes. More was happening behind the scenes – the battle was won with the secret help of the magician’s cabal, the earthquake happened because of an escaped elemental or a spell gone wrong, and so on.

Fantasy-in-the-cracks requires a tremendous amount of research because the first thing you have to do is find the cracks…and once you’ve done that, you have to be very sure that all the events around your story are as accurate as you can make them. It only takes one mistake to invalidate your whole premise, and believe me, the readers will find it. When they do, their suspension of disbelief falls apart, followed quickly by the story. If you think there’s a good chance of you missing something, you’re almost always better off deliberately making something alternate history or parallel history; on the other hand, if you trust your sources and your research skills, this kind of fantasy can be enormously fun and satisfying.

Alternate History With Rivets is the second type, and it can require even more research than Secret History, because here the writer is extrapolating the ripple effect of one specific change in history. Some writers pick a major event, such as Napoleon winning at Waterloo, which instantly causes major changes in history-as-we-know-it; other writers pick something obscure or something that will take a while to have an impact. In either case, though, the idea is to do a rigorous and justifiable examination of the consequences of a single change (or perhaps a tight cluster of small changes). This one needs both research and logic, and even if you can justify every comma, people will argue about it.

Then there’s what I call Parallel History, which is like Alternate History With Rivets, only looser. This is the kind of thing I do. In nearly all of my pseudo-historical fantasies, magic has been around, known, and an accepted part of society for a long time, usually since prehistory. If I were doing AHWR, everything would be different; at the absolute least, the names of people and countries would be strange and the cultures would be unrecognizable.

But Parallel History assumes that for some reason (which the author may or may not have made explicit in their notes, and which hardly ever can make it into the book), history proceeds more or less along the same route even with this major difference that goes back thousands of years. A lot will be different, but enough will be the same that many places, people, and events will be recognizable.

Next would come the total alternate history, the sort you find in Lois Bujold’s Sharing Knife series, where the only thing that’s the same as the real world is the geography. And finally, you get the books where history is used only as something to mine for ideas from which to build a totally imaginary world, from climate to culture.

Which of these things a particular writer chooses to write will depend on a number of things, including how much the writer likes reading about history, what sort of story they have hold of and what they think it needs, and how much confidence the writer has in his/her ability to pull off the degree of worldbuilding accuracy that each sort demands.

That last is particularly important. The past is different from the present in a lot of ways; one is constantly faced with decisions about when, where, and how to present differences in everything from culture to morality to changes in everyday life. I’ve had several people comment on the size of Eff’s family in Thirteenth Child as if it were very strange and unlikely for anyone to have fourteen children, yet my mother was one of ten children, and her family was not considered unusually large, and that was as late as the 1920s.

There are also a surprising number of history buffs around, which one can view as either a feature or a bug. The bug is, of course, all the passionate amateur historians who will point out your mistakes and argue with your interpretations after the book is published and they’re too late to change. The feature is that if you can find any of these folks while the book is still in manuscript, they’re usually happy to provide help with the research.

Which is not to say that there’s a cause-and-effect relationship between running/playing RPGs and success in writing. Far from it – I’ve seen far too many hopeful gamers who think that what made for a wonderful adventure in their game will make an equally wonderful novel if they just write it up. It doesn’t work that way; the things that make for a wonderful and memorable game are just not the same as the things that make for a wonderful and memorable novel. There’s some overlap, but unfortunately not enough.

I will say, however, that I think that running my own invented-from-the-ground-up game did a lot for my writing. Not in any of the obvious ways that people like to leap to conclusions about – I’ve never used a storyline from any of the games I ran, for instance. But trying to make up a background and rules, and then watching my players twist it all to their advantage (and then desperately trying to twist it back) gave me a sense of the possibilities and alternatives that even the simplest decision could set in motion. And trying to keep on top of the player characters during a marathon session was really good practice for staying on top of the rickety heap of branching plotlines that tend to develop when I’m in the early stages of story construction.

But the thing that I personally found most useful about being gamesmistress (GM) was running all the non-player-characters. I thought of it as a bit like improvisational acting, with me having to do a varying number of sufficiently-different characters every session, depending on whether my players were in town dealing with local politics (lots of different non-player-characters [NPCs], each of whom had to have a different personality and agenda even if the players only talked to him/her for five or ten minutes out of a three-hour session), or chasing down an enchanted sword in the ruins far from civilization (usual NPCs limited to evil critters whose dialog and personalities could be summed up as “Aaaargh! Die!”).

When I started writing, I was lousy at giving characters actual personalities. Plots and twists, fine; characters, not so much. Fortunately for me (and my eventual readers), I started gaming when I was barely halfway through the first draft of Shadow Magic, my first novel. Having to act out different characters (starting with my own player characters in other people’s games) made the second half of the first draft much better in terms of characterization, and the second draft better still.

Years of observation have taught me that this is not so for everyone. I was lucky; the kind of game I was participating in was just what I needed to exercise a particularly weak set of skills, in just the right way for me. I’ve seen other writer-gamers rave about similar growth in other areas – worldbuilding being a prime one. The biggest successes seem to come in places that aren’t the point of the game – in things that support and add to the richness and fun of both the game and the books, but that aren’t actually the main thrust of the adventure.

I think that’s an important piece of why a great gaming episode usually doesn’t make for a terribly good story (not without a whole lot of writing and rewriting, anyway). All of the folks I know who have successfully turned a game into a novel or series of novels haven’t actually turned the game into a novel. They’ve taken their character and some favorite NPCs, the setting and history, some of the political situation, and maybe a few of the plot elements (though often not), and remixed them into a new story.

The other part of why great gaming episodes don’t make good novels has to do with pacing and focus. In a game, the focus is on having fun and leveling up your character, so even a totally irrelevant attack by wolves or bandits is interesting. In a book, those considerations are much less important. Yes, we want to watch the hero improve, but watching is much less fun than being part of the action. What I, as a reader, want is to see the hero move forward toward his plot goal; I don’t really care that much about his imaginary stats.

Similarly, I’ve had great gaming evening where the entire group basically sat around chatting with an interesting NPC. The adventure part didn’t get any farther along, but nobody cared because everyone was enjoying the banter. In a novel, that sort of scene can work IF there’s some heavy-duty characterization development going on, but if it’s nothing but witty banter, it’s going to have to be absolutely brilliant to keep a lot of readers from starting to skim.

To make those scenes work in a novel, they have to be made relevant to something besides fun and player stats, and that usually involves adding a lot of plot or character stuff that didn’t happen in the original game. This generally ends up being a lot more work than you might expect…which is why so few of the hopeful gamers actually produce a saleable story when they try to turn their games into books.

And you can’t trust most of your fellow gamers to be objective about a writeup. At best, most of them will love it simply because they were there, too. At worst, they’ll complain bitterly that you gave their character too little time on stage, that you left out all their clever dialog, and that you’re changing the game by putting in stuff that didn’t happen (which of course is what you have to do to make it work as a story).

Mining a game for writing can work…as long as one understands that it is work, and not a quick and easy road to success.

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.

Overbuilding an imaginary world is a problem that is closely related to over-researching. They have similar pitfalls both before and during the writing process: there’s the tendency to get so caught up in researching/inventing details that one keeps putting off the actual writing (in extreme cases, this results in the person abandoning writing altogether, and taking up worldbuilding/researching as a hobby); and then there’s the tendency to try to pack all of the research/invention into the story (also known as “but I can’t waste all that work!” and “I suffered for my art (doing all this research); now, Dear Reader, it’s your turn…”).

It is, of course, a truism that the writer knows more about the world, its history, and the background and backstory of the characters, than ever gets into the story. The thing that seldom comes up is the fact that when the writer knows it and how much the writer knows are things that vary from writer to writer and book to book. The most extreme examples at either end of the scale are those writers who sit down in front of a blank screen and make it all up as they go along, and those other writers like J.R.R. Tolkein, who spent somewhere between forty and sixty years developing the world of The Lord of the Rings.

In between are the rest of us, varying from one end of the scale to the other in terms of how much worldbuilding we need to do before, during, and after writing a story. Yes, after – it’s not unusual for a book to require more worldbuilding to resolve plot-and-consistency problems discovered during the rewrite, and it is exceedingly common to need more worldbuilding when one is writing more than one book using the same setting. I made up steam dragons, daybats, spectral bears, and swarming weasels for Thirteenth Child, but I didn’t nail down the entirety of the magical ecology of the Western plains and the Rocky Mountains. So there are a lot of new critters in Across the Great Barrier that I didn’t know existed until I needed to mention them, even though I’d already written an entire novel in that world. I still don’t really know anything about the magical ecology of South Columbia, Aphrika, Avrupa, etc. I know it’s there, and that it’s different from the ecology of the part of North Columbia I’m dealing with in the books,  but I don’t need to know the details unless and until they come up in the story.

On the other hand, I know way more about cinderdwellers and steam dragons and assorted other things than has made it into either of the books I’ve written so far (and it doesn’t look like getting into the new one, either). Some if it is written down; some isn’t. This pattern holds for everything, from the politics and history of my world(s), to cultures and customs, to things about the family: some of it is written out, some of it is still just in my head. I also do not require myself to stick strictly to every worldbuilding decision I’ve made – as my friend Lois says, “A writer should always reserve the right to have a better idea.” There are always a few things that are non-negotiable, but most things, I’m not stuck with until I’ve used them in the story, and sometimes, not even then.

I work this way because it suits the way my imagination handles things. I require a basic framework for my background, but it can’t be too detailed. Without the basic framework, I go into choice paralysis – I could have any kind of setting, background, history, without limit, and my brain seizes up at the prospect. If the framework is too detailed, though – if I’ve made the mistake of trying to work out an entire imaginary encyclopedia of background – then I start feeling constrained and tied down. Too much detail, for me, makes it feel as if I were writing real-life mimetic fiction, without enough freedom to make up the stuff I want.

That closed-in feeling – the sense that you have to check every other noun against your encyclopedia to make sure you’re being consistent with all that background that isn’t even in the story – is the surest indication I know that the writer has produced more background in more detail than they really need in order to get on with the story. And that itchy point will be at a different level of background information for every writer. Some folks need a three-inch ring binder full of notes on everything from weather to favorite foods to different cultures; others get twitchy if they have more than a few key facts tied down before they start writing.

The trouble is that the itch doesn’t show up while you’re doing the advance worldbuilding; it only shows up once you start to write, and by then it’s almost too late. There are a few other signs of overbuilding a world; one of them is creating Tolkein-esque mountains of material that you find boring to read through. The whole point of writing down aspects of your worldbuilding, for a writer, is so you can write the book without forgetting key points or ending up with major inconsistencies. “Enough worldbuilding” equals “however much YOU need to have in order for the book to be coherent, believable, and consistent.” Whether your background notes are in the form of a glossary, an encyclopedia, a tiddlywiki, a single page of bullet points, or whatever – if they aren’t useful and accessible to you, while you are writing, there’s not much point in having them.

Doing a lot of worldbuilding in advance is not a requirement for writing a fantasy/SF novel. It’s one possible way of getting to the desired end, which is to have a believable portrayal of a world in one’s novel. Whichever way you work – doing it in advance, or making it up as you go – if the result isn’t coherent and consistent and believable without interrupting the story, you have a problem. Ultimately, the solution is yours to figure out, because your solution is going to have to work for your particular brain and writing process. It is, however, a good bet that if you have such a problem, the solution is unlikely to be “do more of whatever you were doing that got you into the problem.”

If what you are doing isn’t working, try something else.