Worldbuilding in some sense is a requirement for all writers. The people and places in fiction may have analogs in real life, but a writer in the U.S. cannot depend on every reader (or even most readers) being familiar with the Lincoln Park area of Chicago or the lower east side of Manhattan, much less the streets of Bombay or London or Ladysmith. The writer therefore has to recreate the real place in her fiction, choosing key details that evoke or imply a raft of other things that add up to that particular place and culture.
For those of us who write fantasy and science fiction, worldbuilding is even more of a necessity. The places our stories occur often have no real-life analogs; one cannot travel to Edoras or Cair Paravel to check out the sights and sounds and smells. One cannot look up the fashions of the Galactic Empire or the social customs of the kzinti or Klingons. The writer makes them up.
One of the first things you find out when you start paying serious attention to this is that every detail you invent implies other things, large and small. A codfish dinner served in a town far inland implies not only a fishing industry, but fast and reliable transportation (or the fish would spoil before they got to the table). The existence of such fast and reliable transportation means news will move as quickly as the fish do, so if you want it to be three weeks before they find out about the magical thunderstorm on the south coast, you suddenly need to come up with a really good reason why they wouldn’t hear about it a day later like everyone else. And so on.
Back when I was still getting the hang of all this, I discovered that one of my biggest problems with making forward progress was that I’d forgotten to make up some aspect of my imaginary world that I suddenly needed. The heroine arrived in a new town, and I’d forgotten to make up the architecture; the city guard showed up and I had no idea how they worked; a foreign diplomat arrived and I had no idea what he considered a proper, respectful greeting and what he considered an insult.
So I started keeping track. Fast-forward ten years or so. I had a twenty-plus-page list of things to think about, and it was still growing. I mentioned this on the Fidonet echo I was on, and people talked me into posting the list. One thing led to another, and my fantasy worldbuilding questions have been up on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ of America web site for … I think it’s getting on for fifteen years now.
Every so often, I get complaints about them. Interestingly, the complaints are always that I left something out, not that X or Y is not really important to worldbuilding. I always tell the complainers the same thing: The fantasy worldbuilding questions are my list of things I have a tendency to forget to think about. Stuff that I always remember to think about is not on my list. If they forget different things, they should make their own list of reminders.
But people persist in trying to make the questions into a prescription or a recipe. And of course, once again, there is no one recipe or set of rules that work for this aspect of writing, any more than any other. I know quite a few writers who do little or no worldbuilding in advance – they have the sort of brain that needs to not be tied down to a previous decision (and they also seem to have a gift for making everything tie together, even if it was made up on the fly).
I’m one of those not tied down writers. If I write down too much stuff before writing (ie do a whole bunch of worldbuilding) the story itself becomes stale. I much prefer going back through the story after to make sure all the details I did include make sense and to put in details that I feel are missing.
Top of my list of things I always forget to invent is ecosystems. I’m always leaving glaring holes -like giant predators with nothing to live on but passing heroes. I probably wouldn’t even have realized I was doing it if I hadn’t read `The Tough Guide to Fantasy’.
Alex – Great, you can be my poster child for people who DON’T do advance worldbuilding! I think knowing how to do it is still a good idea, because just seeing all the possible connections laid out kind of gives one’s subconscious a kick in the right direction, but I also suspect that there are some folks for whom even that is too much. Ultimately, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Chicoy – I love the Tough Guide! Even though it was wildly embarassing the first time I read through it (“Oh, blast, I did that! And that! And…criminy, I did that, too!”). Ecology is one of the things I think is sufficiently fun to play with that I seldom forget about it entirely. It is, in fact, one of the most fun parts of working on the Frontier Magic series for me, and I get kind of disappointed when I start going on about the life-cycle of mirror bugs and why and how cinderdwellers work, only to have my friends’ eyes glaze over! But that’s one of the hazards of worldbuilding.
I went from sketchy building to overbuilding. The worst case of the latter was in that Miller’s Tale universe I mentioned in the first-person discussion. That particular yarn actually grew out of having a good chortle over the Tough Guide, and going through several rounds of trying to create a scenario wherein as many of the classic cliches as possible made some sort of twisted practical sense. It has positive tomes of worldbuilding on my hard drives to back it up.
What I too easily forget, to my cost, is that the worldbuilding I love is just construction lines for the stories – the bits that don’t get into them aren’t yet real, and can and should be varied when the logic of the telling demands it. And the bits the story needs aren’t necessarily the sort of things the historian or the appendix-reader cares about.
This suggests to me that the process of a first story in a setting might be different in kind from its succession of sequels, as the world becomes more set in stone with each addition. If the writer likes open worlds, this should tend to make telling harder, all else equal; if closed ones, then easier. And in either case, perhaps, a different way of making and telling. Do you find it so?
C.f. Roger Zelazny’s brilliantly balanced opening of serial vistas in the first Amber series, versus the increasingly desperate novelties of the second. Tolkien’s steady and valiant deepening of Middle-Earth in successive drafts of Lord of the Rings, from the imbecile blank-sheet beginnings of Bingo Bolger-Baggins et al., is I suppose the all-time stand-out in the other direction!
Gray – Oh, now, there’s a notion! I’d never thought of it before, but yes, it makes all kinds of sense that the writing process would shift as the writer knows more and more about the imaginary world, whether they’re a make-it-up-in-advance type or a do-it-on-the-fly type.
The only thing I can say I’ve noticed myself, off the top of my head, is an increasing need to look up details of what I’ve said in previous books, to make sure they’re consistent with the current one in that setting. It’s a direct parallel to researching history for books like Sorcery and Cecelia or the Mairelon books, which are set in almost-but-not-quite versions of history, except instead of going to A Social History Of England or The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue to look up a custom or a turn of phrase, I have to go to my own books.
I wonder if that’s why I seldom do more than two or three books in the same setting? The Lyra books were an exception, of course, but the last two are so separated in time (both in terms of when I wrote them and in terms of when they’re set) from the first three that they might almost be another setting.
Hmmm . .. I really should consider worldbuilding as part of the work on my own story. it’s recently morphed . . . again. . . and I think it might be a little better. and worldbuilding would certainly help! 🙂
Cimorine – It’s worth a try if you think it will help, but if it turns out not to help, feel free to abandon it and try something else. Figuring out your process is very much an experimental thing, in my experience.
Alex – Not being bored is really critical. 🙂 So is balance. If your boredom threshhold is very low, you may be best served by keeping track of your worldbuilding as you write and make it up, rather than doing it in advance. The main thing is that it all hangs together reasonably well (and to remember that no matter what you do, there will be people who disagree that it would work that way).
I’m learning to find that balance between having enough of an idea of worldbuilding to not make big mistakes but not so much that I bore myself. 😉
Ah yes, the famous list of Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions! Great stuff. 🙂
I was just looking it up again because I had some questions of my own I wanted to post as a sort of addendum if you don’t mind (first part here /plug) and came about this post of yours.
I had no idea there were actually people complaining that your list wasn’t complete! I am quite familiar with the prescription syndrome, though. No idea (yet) why people do that, but I do intend to find out.
Lex – The complaints are mostly in emails, and I’d be a lot more worried if all of them complained that the same things were being left out.
I remember that list! It was one of the first things I found on the internet, back before I discovered fanfiction, even. I once printed out a whole bunch of pages for it, too, although those are long gone by now. Maybe it would help out with plotting my galaxy for Nanowrimo this year: even though I’m writing a sci-fi story it ought to work in the same way. Just change around the questions a little to fit.
I’ll look it up the world building list again. Should be nostalgic. BTW, I have the second Frontier Magic book on Interlibrary Loan request and I’m hoping to get it in soon!
Several people have mentioned Tough Guide, too, and that was awesome as well. I am so sad that there won’t be any more DWJ books forthcoming.