Writers who set their stories in the real world, whether modern or historical, have a double advantage over those of us who alter reality/history to suit our own ends, or who make up our own versions from whole cloth. The first advantage is that they can look up whatever details they need – architecture, dress, maps, culture – and whatever they find, they don’t have to worry about someone saying it couldn’t possibly be like that. People can argue with their sources, but not with the fact that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005.
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. Tolkien 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.
What you said about `not mentioned in the book, just already made up’ that is so spot-on.
I might end up like Mr. Tolkein – spending forty years on creating my story world. *laugh*
So did you make up the missing three Lesser Obligations and annoy yourself, or did you leave him dangling and annoy him?
Since any rational being must admit obligations to horses, rabbits and the laws of physics, and I’ll bet the first nine didn’t have ’em, he should have been able to compose his own.
For use in tabletop roleplaying games, there is that wonderful thing known as “Schrödinger’s Plot-Point” — or, with point-build systems, sometimes “Schrödinger’s Advantage/Disadvantage,” for characters who chose to have a dis/advantage the character doesn’t know from the start.
Basically, it’s a free pass to fill in stuff as needed for the plot. Not all GMs do this, of course — some hate to “wing it” at all. Others ad-lib entire sessions.
Sounds like it’s roughly the same thing, really, as coming up only with the Obligations that one needs!
(I do admit, I am curious — did the remaining Lesser Obligations spring to mind, as bits of background sometimes will — or had the universe been sufficiently “compressed for storage” that unpacking it wasn’t trivial enough to generate ’em?)
I couldn’t imagine sinking forty years into one of the worlds I think up. I do my thinking about my characters/world during bits of time I can’t do anything else, and it’s plenty for the story. Other things I make up while writing.
These points could be made a contest: prize for the best list.
real-world fiction isn’t always better; there’s lots of nit-pickers out there who’ll grab the smallest detail that you get wrong.
Series can be really annoying because you not only made up Y, you stuck it in some story as local color, and only now do you realize the issue. . . .
Never-determined matters like your unspecified spare Obligations really leave a tale room to breathe, in my experience. For the reader too, in a flourishing series. As the teller, I try not to open the box before I at least want to look at the quantum cat…
I think a completist fan would find me rather annoying: I remember one of my RPG worlds in which there was exceptionally little solid detail ever created about the founder of the kingdom or the courts of its near neighbours, but quite detailed selections from its holy scriptures, unresolved philosophical disputes, and songs regionally popular after the third or fourth pint.
Premature and needless filling-in was a vice of mine from childhood, and probably still is where I don’t notice it. Training myself away from it has been great fun, and no little of a liberation. 😉
Please don’t hate me :-). But it’s been 12 years since I first read “Mairelon the Magician” and I’m STILL wondering who Jamie was! (Shoreham was questioning Mairelon about his reasons for bringing Kim along, and he said, “Still trying to make up for Jamie? No, no, I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”). I’m usually ok with soap-bubble details, but for some reason this one has always bugged me. Please tell me!
James Bryant and Beth – I ended up spending an hour or so creating all twelve lesser obligations from scratch, because while I’d made comments in the book about the character needing to do X or Y, I don’t believe I’d specifically said that X or Y was one of the Lesser Obligations, or whether it was merely one of a collection of things that fell under one of the headings. (For instance, a reference to a duty to feed one’s guests well would fall under the more general category of hospitality.) Unfortunately, that was pre-word-processor for letters (I had a computer, but it was WAY too much trouble to hook up the printer just for a letter; I still typed all my correspondence the old-fashioned way), so I no longer remember what I came up with.
Katya – That’s how most of us do it, really. The trick is to do enough of it, but not too much…and to know what “enough” and “too much” are for you.
Mary – But it works the other way, too; you stick in a mutant goldfish for color, and only much later do you realize that it can be used to provide the perfect plot twist (with the added bonus that you don’t have to go back and plant something).
Gray – If you don’t tell the readers things, they make up their own stuff to fill the empty spaces. I’ve occasionally seen real-life examples of this when I don’t want to explain some major life-change, and friends and especially acquaintances begin making comments about their own experiences and finish with remarks like “Well, of course you know that; it’s why you’re doing X, after all.” They’re mostly wrong.
Kate – I’m afraid I have no idea. Obviously, it was some incident in the past that ended badly; probably, it was something that happened before the frame-up, though it may have been something during the time he was spying. Beyond that, I don’t know. If I ever do find out…well, what happens next will depend on how interesting the answer really is. It may be something totally boring that Shoreham is making a bigger deal of than necessary.
“The first advantage is that they can look up whatever details they need”
I don’t know if it’s so much of an advantage. The internet is a godsend for researching locations one can’t get to in person — but what does it *smell* like? Or my particular frustration — there’s plenty of pictures of famous landmarks, but what does the approach look like? What’s behind the photographer? Where are the trash cans? (I take the world’s most boring vacation photos; yes, I actually have pictures of the trash cans at Brookfield Zoo. It was a plot point.)
And you know there’ll be some reader who’s been there or done that, who’ll find the one detail that’s Just Not Right. Frankly, I’m looking forward to finishing the run of current-day novels I’m working on, and getting back to writing science fiction where I can *make stuff up*. (Given that new ideas in the series keep sprouting faster than I can write, I may be looking forward to that for quite some time to come.)
Has it occurred to you that the kind of fan letter where they ask for those little world building details is the ultimate compliment to your success in making that world real for them? It’s so real for them that they’re sure you must have filled in all those details, at least for yourself, even though they didn’t make it into the book.
I’ll beg to disagree about real world settings, at least when you’re dealing with historical ones. I’ve done exactly one bit of historical fiction, and it was an exercise in discovering how little I *really* knew about the period where I’d set it. The details you want in a story for descriptions and so forth don’t make it into the history books. Making up those details is a *lot* easier.
Okay, now you’ve done it. The Raven Ring is one of my favorite books ever, and I collect Tarot cards. I’d always assumed you’d done the sensible thing and only made up the plot-relevant cards. Now I really want to know what the rest of the deck is (and I’m suddenly debating making my Master’s painting thesis be illustrating the whole thing)…