Characters have to interact with their world. They have to know it, and it affects their behavior. Kate said a character can talk about the world like they do with their pets.
Paul brought up the perennial question of "As you know, Bob" dialogue. Many readers of this blog will already know what that means, but essentially, it's having a character explain, in dialogue to another character, something about the world that both of them already know. I have one main technique for expressing this kind of information without having it seem clunky and incongruous: conflict. People will far more naturally utter words about things they already know when they are disagreeing with another person, or when they are encountering problems in the way that things are supposed to work.
The example I love is from Mary Pope Osborne's first Magic Treehouse book, Dinosaurs After Dark. A young girl is running down the road and yells, "Help! A monster!" and her brother replies, "Yeah, sure. A real monster in Frog Creek, Pennsylvania." When you are working in fiction, there's no necessary requirement that monsters be fake, but she lets us know this in one line. This is a critical piece of worldbuilding. Furthermore, she also lets us know where the kids live without having anyone say, "As you know, we live in Frog Creek..."
Recommended techniques for avoiding "as you know, Bob" dialogue:
1. Put in a character who is unfamiliar with the world
2. Have something go wrong
3. Have people in conflict (fighting is not necessary; disagreement is sufficient)
Having a character who is unfamiliar with the world will give you opportunities to have people who do know the world well explain things to that person. It is not always an option, however. In my world of Varin, all people are insiders and none are outsiders. However, I take advantage of the different castes and subcultures of Varin to create the conflict that allows the world to be illuminated. This is one of the reasons why I use multiple points of view.
With multiple points of view, you can ask, "Why does this person judge things the way they do? What about their past might have caused them to have these judgments? Why would they disagree with another character, or see things differently?"
What are the individual experiences that affect a character's backstory? Are they fitting with expectations or not? Do they meet the expectations of their family or not? Does their family meet the expectations of the larger society or not? Is this character well-aligned or misaligned, and in what way, and because of what kind of experiences?
Do you need to know that a particular character loved to wear pink shoes? Not necessarily, but we might want to know why their wearing of pink shoes was important. Were they gender non-conforming? Was it just the wrong shade of pink to be appropriate, somehow?
If your world is resource-poor, think about what that means for a character's past experience and expectations. Think about where clothes and other items would come from, and how likely the character would be to possess them.
Beware the danger of default assumptions that come with your own cultural background.
There are a lot of things in our own world that we may not know. Some of us would be able to say where Prince Harry went to school, but others might not.
Don't give six earrings to someone playing Mary, Queen of Scots.
A lot of backstory information is likely to find its way into the "Miscellaneous notes" pile rather than into the story. However, you will find that the more you know, the more the story will take on dimension. The things you know will show in how you write your character's narrative.
Kat said she's often dinged for not being cinematically descriptive. You don't need to write this way, necessarily. It's better to get your details right than to go for total physical immersion.
Kate told us about a podcast on bad books where she would hear passages and wonder "what mobius size and shape is this room?" or "how many arms are there in the orgy?" Some authors have written about rooms where the sun is always streaming in the windows... forgetting that the sun moves over the course of a day. The constellation of Orion is not in the sky all year unless you are migrating with it.
Kat said she has had the experience of driving all night and watching the sky wheel. Having a character who notices that, or doesn't notice that, is part of their backstory.
What does your character know? What kind of information can they access? What is normal to discuss? What is not normal to discuss?
A lot of a character's psychology forms between the ages of zero and seven. Did anything happen to your character during that period? Did they form natural expectations of attachment to others, or not?
Try not to be simplistic when thinking about how past experiences influence a character. Kate told us about a book where test tube babies were compared with womb-grown babies, and the authors made the test tube babies more distant. Be careful that you don't fall into this kind of essentialism. Having lots of people in your parenting system may be healthy or normal.
The point of view of the writer is not always congruent with the character's point of view.
We also talked about narration style. How is backstory included? Kat talked about how omniscient viewpoint explaining the backstory can be useful. Many modern writers have been taught "show, don't tell," but this admonition is not necessarily helpful, and has drawbacks. Anything "shown" requires more work from the reader. Some kinds of information are best told, and if you can "tell" beautifully, it may be very successful.
Think about who the narrator is, and what they know. Some narrators have a colonialist quality (intentionally or unintentionally). This is one reason why you want to know who the narrator character is, and what their backstory is.
Kat says she notices when an omniscient narrator is pandering to a person who is not her, but she knows a lot about the context from her own experience that doesn't match the narrator's knowledge.
Always ask who your reader is.
Sometimes, insiders to a culture may find it interesting to look at an outsider's viewpoint on their culture. Kat told us about Americans living in Finland who vlog about Finland in English, and how many of their fans are Finns who enjoy the outsider perspective on their home.
Many TV commentators like Trevor Noah or even Johnny Carson have been outsiders to the culture they are commenting on in some sense. They bring in their own cultural assumptions, however, because everyone does.
Don't underestimate the power of the outsider-insider distinction in allowing you to explain things. Backstories are a key ingredient of this.
Some people in a culture are expected to be in a state of learning, like children. People in this state can also be useful for writers and narrators.
A person's idiosyncratic backstory can make them feel like they don't fit in interesting ways.
What if you were socialized to inhabit a different gender from the one you feel? What does it mean to have society tell you you're an outsider?
Even ordinary people have backstory. What backstory makes a character "ordinary" as opposed to "extraordinary"?
Whose backstory is relevant? Are the backstories of non-important people relevant? Why would those people not be important?
Thank you to everyone who participated in the discussion. Dive into Worldbuilding meets today at 4pm Pacific with guest author Cadwell Turnbull to discuss his new novel, The Lesson. I hope you can join us!
#SFWApro
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