1. How to create a planet from the solar system up
2. How to create a rich setting for story writing
Another one of the really common preconceptions about worldbuilding is that it requires you to create a world massive enough to require an entire "world bible," and all before you begin writing any of the story. This is not the case; worldbuilding can begin with the story and continue well after the story has launched, and it should not require you to fill reams of paper with notes before you can create a single word of the story about it.
Kat notes, however, that a key question is "How much divergence are you building into what the audience is used to?" In a sense, we're never NOT using a giant world, because whatever we don't invent tends to come from our own world, and is likely to be unconsidered.
Maris remarked that literary fiction also has key divergences from our world that need attention. Urban fantasy takes these divergences and pushes them further; science fiction and fantasy tend to take them even further. Kate added that even a sitcom that posits a bunch of rich white people living in big apartments in New York has a strong element of fantasy in it.
One excellent example of worldbuilding that involves creating a setting from our own world is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which creates a very strong sense of Sweden and its climate, locations, and culture. In my own case, this is a foreign world to me, because I've never been to Sweden. John Irving's work creates a very strong sense of New England as a setting. One can almost consider the world and its culture as a character in the story. Clarity of scene, and a sense of structure in the setting, arise from excellent worldbuilding.
Historical fiction also has a lot of worldbuilding work to do. It is often called upon to correct wrong ideas (especially about race) and help us understand what it felt like to live in the world during the time period it features.
Kat has a concept she uses called "projected reader," which basically refers to the intended audience of a piece, with a few nuances added - specifically, that the intention may not be conscious on the part of the author. What does your audience know, and what do they need to know? How big is the gap between those two things? What kind of bridge do you need to create between them, as an author? The answer to these questions may be similar whether you are in a secondary world or working in a world that is Earth, but unfamiliar to readers. Here's an example: if you are writing about high school, and your projected reader is in high school, then you are free to leave some things unexplained.
Some people like to know all the physical details so they can describe them in a way that could be rendered in a painting. Sometimes it's important to do this. Other times, it's less so.
Third person limited point of view is a really great way to limit the scope of what needs to be described.
If we want to consider what is happening at the word level, any content word has the ability to bring with it a whole load of contextual information that suggests things about the world. In the conversation I called this a word schema. The author has to choose a word that matches the intended contextual information as closely as possible, and may then have to do some work to control aspects of that information, cutting off some reader expectations and encouraging others.
If you are Tolkien and you write potatoes into your world, is it a problem? Which readers will accept it, and which will start wondering whether Middle Earth has experienced a Columbian Exchange? What happens if you bring silk into your world? What kind of contextual assumptions will it bring with it?
Future science fiction tends to bring traditional assumptions of its own. Rayguns and faster-than-light travel tend to be on the list.
How much do you need to know about a moon in order to write about it?
How do you deal with the iceberg problem, where you generally need to know a lot more than appears on the page in your story? How much are you supporting the material that is there?
Are your worldbuilding details story-relevant? Are they character-relevant?
I had a terrible problem with the worldbuilding for the Star Trek TNG episode Darmok because although I loved the language concept, I felt it was insufficiently supported by the worldbuilding.
In a sense, there's a contract between the reader and the author, what Jed Hartman calls "author points." It's a question of how much the reader trusts the author and what they are willing to allow, and what breaks their suspension of disbelief.
I then asked my discussants whether they felt there was any part of worldbuilding they would identify as indispensable.
Maris suggested the question of what your character can use as a metaphor: would a character use a water metaphor on a desert world, in what way, and what would that mean?
Kat talked about choosing curse words for the world, setting up rubrics of cursing and asking what a character is upset by. Is it religiosity, filth, sexual experience? Or should it be something like randomness? Or leaks (if you live on a space ship)? How does your character think of the world and its relations and expectations? Is the person marginalized? Do they have a struggle with the environment? Attitudes and judgment are really important here.
Maris remarked that one of the most important things is what the character judges as normal vs. what is weird.
What if being bilaterally symmetrical was surprising? This would hint at an alien experience.
Paul said he values family structures, relationships and marriages, and how kids are raised. What is the smallest nuclear family? Do people live separated, or in groups? What do societies do? What does that say about the world?
Cliff talked about implied worldbuilding, and what the reader needs in order for the world to make sense. He also noted that epic fantasy worldbuilding and flash fiction worldbuilding have very different requirements. He pointed out the marked/unmarked distinction. Something that is unmarked is considered normal, default, unremarkable; something that is marked is unusual, worthy of note. In our own society, a white cis male Christian Anglo-Saxon Protestant - who is bilaterally symmetrical - is the unmarked default. Anything that is unmarked in our society will be bought to story context by a reader, and the author has to build up story context in order to change that.
Whenever an author doesn't put a marker or label on something they are relying on the default. If you don't want something to be perceived as default in your story world, put a label on it.
A lot of story worlds assume the existence of liquid intoxicants in association with violence. "Saloons" are a genre in and of themselves.
Not all story worlds are built in depth and highly consistent. The kinds of departures a story is allowed to take from its norms are also part of the story's worldbuilding. Cliff mentioned how Futurama brings past assumptions into the far future, as when it features space pirates.
Paul noted you can start writing first and then backform the world later, building the iceberg underneath you as you go.
I mentioned exploratory drafts, which are drafts of a story in which the author is exploring the world for the first time.
Is realism valuable? Sometimes people will swear that it's more important than anything else, but people don't agree on what is realistic. A lot of times, realism has more to do with what expectations the reader expects to have fulfilled than the actual features of a world.
Fans will often build a wiki to try to make story worlds make sense.
Sometimes what you come into story creation with is a set of story kernels, or what Kat called shards. I imagine that story worlds grow like crystals from the shards we come in with. The principles that form those crystals are often unconscious, so we should look out for them and try to understand them.
Comic books retcon, reboot, and do all sorts of things with their storylines. The way I think of this is that comics are often fanfic of themselves. Maris said that instead of running on author points, they often run on character points.
Worlds are not always consistent. In Star Wars, "your outdated religion" was only 20 years ago! Though it should be pointed out that sometimes people in real life refer to each other's current beliefs as outdated.
There are many kinds of worldbuilding. A company like Disney might have teams working on world-internal consistency. When we had Monica Valentinelli visit the show, she talked about how to work for consistency in a shared world.
How much elasticity does the world have? How do readers/viewers cope with departures from norms? How much does this have to do with episodic storytelling? Does the storyline have to re-set to its norms after every episode?
This was a very interesting discussion! Thanks to everyone who attended. Today, Dive into Worldbuilding will meet at 4pm Pacific to discuss Sounds and Onomatopoeia. I hope you can join us!
#SFWApro
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