On Relevance

[pmmg]

Trad publishing has this to offer: the badly-written story will be seen by only a few eyes, whereas the self-published disaster will be paraded up and down the streets (at least for a little while).

Are you saying my child is ugly?

I consider world-building to be a collection of unique facts about the secondary world that has been created.

I feel compelled to counter this a little and say, even if you are using the real world (Earth as we know it), there is still world building. One may think setting something here on the blue planet, means we can assume the reader knows the world, but really they don't as it applies to your story. So much of the world, and its places, have so many different facets to them, that it is impossible to capture them all, and one must direct readers to the ones that matter. If I just take Chicago, and want to tell a story about gangsters, I am unlikely to show aspects of the city that do not lend themselves to the Gangster narrative, and likewise, I am probably going to leave the gangsters out if I am telling a story about love in the same city. (Though I suppose you can have the gangsters shoot down the young couple in love on valentines day if you want to bring them together...)

I must still present the world in a suggestive way that helps build the atmosphere for my story, and keeps the reader focused on the things that matter to it. I never really get to say, its Earth, so I can skip it.

 

[skip.knox]

No child is ugly, but some are poorly dressed. <g>

All your children, however, are above average. <also g>

 

[pmmg]

I had to look <g> up, that is old school

 

[skip.knox]

One of the small pleasures of getting old is being able to make references the young folks don't get. Turnabout is fair play, sez I.

 

[Prince of Spires]

No child is ugly, but some are poorly dressed.

I partially disagree. I've seen a fair few babies, and most of them are ugly. Fortunately, many of them seem to grow out of it....

 

[Incanus]

I feel compelled to counter this a little and say, even if you are using the real world (Earth as we know it), there is still world building. One may think setting something here on the blue planet, means we can assume the reader knows the world, but really they don't as it applies to your story. So much of the world, and its places, have so many different facets to them, that it is impossible to capture them all, and one must direct readers to the ones that matter. If I just take Chicago, and want to tell a story about gangsters, I am unlikely to show aspects of the city that do not lend themselves to the Gangster narrative, and likewise, I am probably going to leave the gangsters out if I am telling a story about love in the same city. (Though I suppose you can have the gangsters shoot down the young couple in love on valentines day if you want to bring them together...)

I must still present the world in a suggestive way that helps build the atmosphere for my story, and keeps the reader focused on the things that matter to it. I never really get to say, its Earth, so I can skip it.

What you have described here makes me think of yet another term we see from time to time: story world. To me, these are the chosen details that are relevant to the story--hey, at least I managed to circle around to Skip's main point again(!)

Mostly, I like my original definition for world-building. But, I fully acknowledge that it is merely my own and that most folks use a wider definition (which is often indistinguishable from 'setting' the way I see it).

 

[skip.knox]

I can offer some extensions to "setting", for your amusement.

One, character. This works best if dealing with a series. What I have found is that I have one set of ideas of a character at the beginning, but as the story idea progresses, the ideas about character both change and grow. So, I do have a section in my WorldReference that is specific to recurring characters. This ranges from simple matters such as physical characteristics to complex backstories and relationships between characters. This, indeed, happens within a standalone novel, but such character notes are kept within the project (that is, along with the files that comprise the story itself). With a series, though, I need to consult the World Reference to help ensure continuity across novels. So there's one extension to Setting.

Lore is a second extension. I use this term to include everything from local legends to origins of gods to actual history. It's "stuff that has happened" along with "stuff that is believed to have happened". Here again, there's some need of this in a standalone, but the need become greater when dealing with a series. It's not Setting, strictly speaking, but is more like background or backstory. When our adventuring party rolls into TownA in Novel2, it needs to be the same place as what they encountered in Novel1. I take Setting to mean the physical layout of the city. I take Lore to mean local heroes, founding legends, and so on. A bit of a fine point, I grant.

Plot is a third. Here, I mean the obvious: while there's an arc to each character, a plot to each novel, in certain kinds of series there is also an over-arching plot. This isn't really setting, but it absolutely needs to be tracked somewhere. Oh, hi, WorldReference! Fancy meeting you here.

I offer this not meaning to persuade anyone but to present possibilities to those who are first embarking on this whole Story Bible idea. And also to correct those who egregiously err. <g>

 

[A. E. Lowan]

I partially disagree. I've seen a fair few babies, and most of them are ugly. Fortunately, many of them seem to grow out of it....

I can agree with that. I was an ugly little baby. Looked like a troll doll. But I did become a stinking cute toddler.

 

[pmmg]

I can agree with that. I was an ugly little baby. Looked like a troll doll. But I did become a stinking cute toddler.

View attachment 3939

So cute

 

[Devor]

Reading through this thread, I have a random grab bag of thoughts.

Brandon Sanderson has said that conveying worldbuilding in an interesting way to the reader is the grand skill of writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, and it's what set these genres apart from the other genres out there. And I agree with him.

^ The Grand Skill may be overstating it, but I also strongly agree with this sentiment.

We hear a lot about how we're not supposed to infodump, and how we can't just tell our readers things, and all the faults with all the other ways to provide worldbuilding, because most people do it poorly. But I think of Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones, and anime, and the different books and webtoons I read. And the truth in my opinion is, people #&$!ing love a good info-dump. It delivers this "Wow!" factor that sets your world apart.

To be blunt, the problem is that:

1) Our worlds usually suck, so the info-dumps deliver a "meh" or eye-roll factor instead. Or to be a little nicer about it, we tend to copy a lot from other worlds, many of them immensely popular, so an info-dump attempting to replicate a "Wow!" that readers have already felt tends to fall flat.

2) We don't know how to do it. We keep hearing that we have to show because that's what novel writing is. But a good info-dump is more like learning how to give a speech, or teach a class, while making every word utterly fascinating. It can absolutely be done. And in a novel we get to reinforce it with the narrative, so we have that to play with. But most people hate public speaking, and in practice that's usually where you see this skill done well. You've got to channel your favorite TikTokers or YouTubers when you info-dump. Most of us can't imagine ourselves in that position.

So where does that leave us? Struggling to find ways to lore-drop in bits and pieces, which usually means using character voice or dialogue to slip it in. Using character voice is easier when have a character who's analytical and constantly thinking things through. Using dialogue is easier when you have a character who's "new" to things. And now we have worldbuilding needs telling us what kind of characters we should use. That's.... great.

I think world-building means something much more specific than just any setting. By your definition, all fiction employs world-building. By my much more narrow definition, I'd estimate that maybe1-3% of fiction employs world-building (I'm just guessing).

It doesn't matter to me how people want to use the words. I'll say that I find myself using worldbuilding in two different ways. The first is behind the scenes, planning out the magic systems and cultures and what the dragon eats when knights aren't available. If you're writing in real world you don't do that kind of worldbuilding, or it's replaced by research.

But the second way I use worldbuilding is inside the narrative, where it covers anything about the fantasy universe that has to be explained for the reader to understand; essentially, it's that "extra exposition" we have to juggle because we're writing fantasy. So when you describe the fireball flying out of a wand, I don't think of that as worldbuilding. That's just describing an action scene. A description of the boneyard your characters are walking through is just regular setting. The worldbuilding is when you have to explain, hey this is a wand of fireballs, the wizard can't do it without the wand; or hey, that boneyard is where the bodies were put after a massive battle, supposedly to remind people how tough we are, but naturally, it's the source of everything that's haunting us now.

In this second sense, I think something set in the real world might have to do some worldbuilding. For example, if your novel is set at a police precinct, and you have to spend time explaining proper arrest and intake procedures to your reader. That's still extra exposition you have to provide so that readers know what's going on.

That first sense of worldbuilding "behind the scenes" encourages you to create more, while that second sense of worldbuilding "inside the narrative" is kind of like the price tag. Exposition is clunky. I said above, but usually it's not good material, and we're not good with it. When I'm writing I sometimes find myself cutting and consolidating things on the fly so that it's easier to explain on the page, sometimes just to cut a few words. That kind of streamlining is something to get used to. And every time I've done that it's made the work better.

So yeah, if it's not relevant, or your readers can understand it without explaining it, then cut that explanation, and don't be afraid to make cuts in how it works in your notes, too.

My editor would tell you that getting the reader to know and understand the differences between two cities in your setting should be done through the eyes, ears and mind of the characters (showing) and not through a potentially tedious narrative description (telling).

I'm not going to debate with your editor through you. But telling happens all the time in novels. You can show a lot on the walk through a city, but at some point someone has to think or say, "It's the damned king's policies causing all this." At some point readers even get mad when characters don't explain the obvious things.

One other point to raise here, though it's a bit of a tangent. It regards "the reader". As in, getting the reader to recognize and appreciate something, or not boring the reader. Any advice involving that sort of phrasing. What are we talking about here?

We've all heard the concept of a muse. I heard someone put a twist on the word once, I couldn't possibly remember where, but instead of the muse as the nymph whispering the story in your ear, think of the muse as the person you're speaking to as you write your book. It's your buddy, or that person you like, or your kids. You know how your attitude can change when you're talking to different people? Your muse is the person you think about to set the right attitude for the words you use in your book.

When I was in high school and college, I played dungeons and dragons 3.5e in chatrooms, mostly as DM, in a style that wasn't too different from writing. And if you're not really good at it people will not stick with you week after week for those games. So even now, when I write, I mostly try to impress the guys I used to play with. I used to tease at their characters and mess with them like a prankster - one player's backstory mentor would be the same another player's backstory villain - you know, the same crap I pull today on my MCs. You know, they're my muse.

At some point I had to start thinking more deep POV, because I did all those games in kind of a camera lens, so I channel my wife. Would she be interested in what this character's thinking? Would she find it personal and touching or whiny and annoying? If I were telling her the story sitting together on the couch would I mention these points or not?

I believe it helps, a lot, to have a reader-person in your head. It helps especially to have someone in mind you've actually talked to an awful lot.

 

[Mad Swede]

We hear a lot about how we're not supposed to infodump, and how we can't just tell our readers things, and all the faults with all the other ways to provide worldbuilding, because most people do it poorly. But I think of Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones, and anime, and the different books and webtoons I read. And the truth in my opinion is, people #&$!ing love a good info-dump. It delivers this "Wow!" factor that sets your world apart.

To be blunt, the problem is that:

1) Our worlds usually suck, so the info-dumps deliver a "meh" or eye-roll factor instead. Or to be a little nicer about it, we tend to copy a lot from other worlds, many of them immensely popular, so an info-dump attempting to replicate a "Wow!" that readers have already felt tends to fall flat.

2) We don't know how to do it. We keep hearing that we have to show because that's what novel writing is. But a good info-dump is more like learning how to give a speech, or teach a class, while making every word utterly fascinating. It can absolutely be done. And in a novel we get to reinforce it with the narrative, so we have that to play with. But most people hate public speaking, and in practice that's usually where you see this skill done well. You've got to channel your favorite TikTokers or YouTubers when you info-dump. Most of us can't imagine ourselves in that position.

So where does that leave us? Struggling to find ways to lore-drop in bits and pieces, which usually means using character voice or dialogue to slip it in. Using character voice is easier when have a character who's analytical and constantly thinking things through. Using dialogue is easier when you have a character who's "new" to things. And now we have worldbuilding needs telling us what kind of characters we should use. That's.... great.

Yes, our readers probably do want that sense of awe and wonder when they read a fantasy story. Certainly mine seem to. My readers also seem to prefer seeing things through the characters, although this may simply reflect that they read my books which are written in my style.

The question is how we create that sense of awe. I wonder if this depends on what sort of story we're writing. Epic or high fantasy almost requires that sense of wonder, and given how much influence Tolkien has had on that sub-genre we as authors can probably get away with descriptive texts which describe the setting and the wider world. I'm not sure we as authors could get away with that sort of descriptive text in a darker and more gritty setting, or in a story which has more pace that some high fantasy does.

As for the need to lore-drop driving what sort of characters we create for our stories, I would suggest that if we find ourselves in that situation we need to rethink how we're writing. I've never had that problem, but if I did I think I would ask myself why I needed to drop that piece of information to the reader and how else it might be done. To me, a problem like that suggests that I've got an issue with the flow and pacing of my story, in that I think that the flow of story should dictate when and how information is dropped so that the info-drop doesn't feel forced or out of place. This probably reflects the way I was told stories as a child (see my comments below), which was oral and not book based. In oral story telling you can't get away with a big info dump, you have to do it in other ways so that you don't lose the listeners interest.

It doesn't matter to me how people want to use the words. I'll say that I find myself using worldbuilding in two different ways. The first is behind the scenes, planning out the magic systems and cultures and what the dragon eats when knights aren't available. If you're writing in real world you don't do that kind of worldbuilding, or it's replaced by research.

But the second way I use worldbuilding is inside the narrative, where it covers anything about the fantasy universe that has to be explained for the reader to understand; essentially, it's that "extra exposition" we have to juggle because we're writing fantasy. So when you describe the fireball flying out of a wand, I don't think of that as worldbuilding. That's just describing an action scene. A description of the boneyard your characters are walking through is just regular setting. The worldbuilding is when you have to explain, hey this is a wand of fireballs, the wizard can't do it without the wand; or hey, that boneyard is where the bodies were put after a massive battle, supposedly to remind people how tough we are, but naturally, it's the source of everything that's haunting us now.

In this second sense, I think something set in the real world might have to do some worldbuilding. For example, if your novel is set at a police precinct, and you have to spend time explaining proper arrest and intake procedures to your reader. That's still extra exposition you have to provide so that readers know what's going on.

That first sense of worldbuilding "behind the scenes" encourages you to create more, while that second sense of worldbuilding "inside the narrative" is kind of like the price tag. Exposition is clunky. I said above, but usually it's not good material, and we're not good with it. When I'm writing I sometimes find myself cutting and consolidating things on the fly so that it's easier to explain on the page, sometimes just to cut a few words. That kind of streamlining is something to get used to. And every time I've done that it's made the work better.

So yeah, if it's not relevant, or your readers can understand it without explaining it, then cut that explanation, and don't be afraid to make cuts in how it works in your notes, too.

There is a risk with that approach, and that is that we unconciously write for a group of readers within our own culture. We share some values and some experiences, we live in similar places and know similar towns. So we as authors can make implicit assumptions about what our readers already know and understand. That isn't criticism, it's a natural way of seeing the world.

In my view, a possible consequence of this is that our stories only really sell in places like our own so we risk losing a wider audience. That may not matter, given that we all have different reasons for writing. But I suggest that we might want to bear it in mind when we write. As L P Hartley wrote in the opening line of The Go-Between, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

I'm not going to debate with your editor through you.

I have not asked you to do so.

What I have done is to present what my editor - a professional editor, working for a publisher - looks for when editing a work of fiction.

But telling happens all the time in novels. You can show a lot on the walk through a city, but at some point someone has to think or say, "It's the damned king's policies causing all this." At some point readers even get mad when characters don't explain the obvious things.

I suspect we're talking past one another. What you describe isn't telling, it's showing, at least in the terms that showing has been explained to me. And it's showing because one of the characters says or thinks it in response to something rather than it being presented in some form of infodump.

We've all heard the concept of a muse. I heard someone put a twist on the word once, I couldn't possibly remember where, but instead of the muse as the nymph whispering the story in your ear, think of the muse as the person you're speaking to as you write your book. It's your buddy, or that person you like, or your kids. You know how your attitude can change when you're talking to different people? Your muse is the person you think about to set the right attitude for the words you use in your book.

When I was in high school and college, I played dungeons and dragons 3.5e in chatrooms, mostly as DM, in a style that wasn't too different from writing. And if you're not really good at it people will not stick with you week after week for those games. So even now, when I write, I mostly try to impress the guys I used to play with. I used to tease at their characters and mess with them like a prankster - one player's backstory mentor would be the same another player's backstory villain - you know, the same crap I pull today on my MCs. You know, they're my muse.

At some point I had to start thinking more deep POV, because I did all those games in kind of a camera lens, so I channel my wife. Would she be interested in what this character's thinking? Would she find it personal and touching or whiny and annoying? If I were telling her the story sitting together on the couch would I mention these points or not?

I believe it helps, a lot, to have a reader-person in your head. It helps especially to have someone in mind you've actually talked to an awful lot.

I don't have a reader-person in my head, but what I do tend to think of is my grandmother and the way she told stories. She had what in some ways was a very Swedish style of oral storytelling, a style which has stayed with me and heavily influenced my style of writing. That does of course make my books very Swedish in their style and structure so readers in other countries might not enjoy them so much.

 

[Incanus]

Lots of interesting points made here. I may not be able to tackle all of them. Great discussion, though. I’m in the thick of dealing with this sort of stuff right now.

I largely agree with the idea of the ‘grand skill’. Speaking only for myself, this has been the hardest thing to get right while I run my revision. It is largely this issue that will have me going back for multiple passes before showing it to even a single reader.

I definitely noticed a while back that all the great books have much more ‘telling’ than is generally advised to use. Though I still try to use as much ‘showing’ as possible, I believe there’s an important lesson in there.

Extra-exposition—to me this relates to the ‘grand skill’. This is the expo needed to tell this one, specific story, and it cannot belong in any other story. This is why in one world, a wizard can cast twenty fireballs in an afternoon, and feel a tad weary afterwards, or in another world, why casting only one of those fireballs is the culmination of decades of learning, and nearly kills the caster. One way or another, the reader needs to understand why these things work they way they do.

I still don’t see how working with real world details, even esoteric ones, can be considered world-building. The example of arrest and intake procedures at a police precinct is purely a matter of research. It’s something that exists already, and can be verified by people in the know.

I wonder sometimes if the types of stories we are working on leads to different perspectives on this subject. For good or ill, I have a large number of custom creations for my world, and basically no ‘stock’ fantasy elements. I have no way of knowing to what degree others are doing this sort of thing. I may have made things unnecessarily hard on myself going this route. But I’m there now, so onward is the only way-----

(I wrote this a tad hastily--apologies if I didn't make my points as clear as they might be.)

 

[Devor]

There is a risk with that approach, and that is that we unconciously write for a group of readers within our own culture. We share some values and some experiences, we live in similar places and know similar towns. So we as authors can make implicit assumptions about what our readers already know and understand. That isn't criticism, it's a natural way of seeing the world.

I don’t understand how you got to this part about cultural biases from what I was saying about streamlining the world to need fewer explanations inside the narrative.

 

[Devor]

I wonder sometimes if the types of stories we are working on leads to different perspectives on this subject. For good or ill, I have a large number of custom creations for my world, and basically no ‘stock’ fantasy elements. I have no way of knowing to what degree others are doing this sort of thing. I may have made things unnecessarily hard on myself going this route. But I’m there now, so onward is the only way-----

For what it’s worth, I have both a ton of original races and stock ones. There are twelve magic systems, but only one, seelie / fairy magic, is being explored. So I have a ton of different seelie races and creatures. When the other eleven magics come up, I use stock fantasy archetypes and treat it with humor (it’s implied that they exist on the same developed level in some other region of the world and in my notes I have brief gestures towards what that looks like). So I have a ton of worldbuilding material that I have to explain, not to mention the multilayered history that is all highly important to the characters. Like, I really piled into my worldbuilding, I couldn’t begin to cover it all.

 

[Mad Swede]

I don’t understand how you got to this part about cultural biases from what I was saying about streamlining the world to need fewer explanations inside the narrative.

It was when you wrote:

So yeah, if it's not relevant, or your readers can understand it without explaining it, then cut that explanation, and don't be afraid to make cuts in how it works in your notes, too.

As you wrote, you don't need to describe the details in your setting if the readers already understand it. That is partly about obvious things (like bears living in the forest) but it can also be things which the readers already know because they live in the same sort of country as you. Put another way, we often make certain implicit assumptions about the cultural references we share with the readers. This is quite noticeable in the Harry Potter books, at least to me - J K Rowling assumes that readers are familiar with the way British (and to a degree US) schools work so she doesn't detail or explain certain things in the setting.

Another example would be the Demondeckarna books (for teenagers). The authors assume Swedish readers, so a lot of things about the characters, the way they behave, the places they live, are taken for granted. As a reader you know roughly what the people are like, your schoolfriends are pretty like them and so are your real-life neighbours. You know what the town is like, there's an ICA, a school, a church, bus stops etc. It's like your home town and almost every other small town in Sweden. All this is reflected in the pacing, structure and writing style of these books, simply because the readers are in on it all.

Translating a book like that is difficult because there are so many implicit cultural references. These get lost unless the translator does a full interpretation and adds things as a way of explaining the references. And that sort of interpretation doesn't usually get done. This is why the Swedish language translations of Harry Potter and the Discworld books are so poor, many of the (British) cultural references get lost. An example would be in one of the footnotes in Terry Pratchett's "Raising Steam" which contains the sentence "The whole business traditionally begins with a plot, in every sense of the word." It's a reference to the speculative house building that occured in the UK during the 1920s, 1930s, 1950s and even later than that, and most UK readers will have heard tales about housing like that. Those same readers will also understand how the joke is phrased and hangs on the word "plot". But there is no way of translating that joke to Swedish, partly because there is no similar building history and partly because Swedish uses different words for the various meanings of "plot". So how do you interpret that?

 

[Devor]

^ That feels like a different question. That's not about the "extra exposition" from how the fantasy world is designed. If I have to explain a magic system, I have to do so regardless of what cultures my readers are from. There's no local frame of reference for these things.

Regardless, I just wanted to make sure I understood you before responding to anything.

I suspect we're talking past one another. What you describe isn't telling, it's showing, at least in the terms that showing has been explained to me. And it's showing because one of the characters says or thinks it in response to something rather than it being presented in some form of infodump.

Some things just have to be told. So we usually mask telling in character voice and dialogue.

I've seen some TikTokers use the word infodump more broadly, but the way I believe most people on Mythic Scribes use the word infodump is to refer to when you have to give any kind of lengthy explanation of your worldbuilding to readers. A huge number of worldbuilding infodumps happen in the form of, "As you know, Bob..." or "New Guy, let me fill you in." It's still an infodump, whether it's in dialogue or the narrative or whatever else. It's still going through an explanation of how things work for our readers to understand something.

Even if something can be shown properly, showing consumes a lot of words. That's worth it for character matters like "he was angry." It's often not worth the words for worldbuilding questions. A quick explanation can be clunky, but taking part of a scene to show it can become a tumor.

It's not unheard of to have a spreadsheet, where every row is a chapter and every column is plot thread, and you have one column where you map out your worldbuilding lore drops to make sure you're pacing out your exposition.

 

[Prince of Spires]

I still don’t see how working with real world details, even esoteric ones, can be considered world-building. The example of arrest and intake procedures at a police precinct is purely a matter of research. It’s something that exists already, and can be verified by people in the know.

A good example of non-fantasy worldbuilding is in the Mission Impossible movies. They're set in "the real world", but they still have rules attached that are clearly not in our world. A clear example is the technology they use. They have face masks that are perfect copies of other people, to the point where they pretty much even change your body to match that of the person you're imitating. They have gadgets that let you climb up the outside of buildings. And so on. All that is worldbuilding.

Or in the TV show Grey's Anatomy (which is a hospital series). Again, set in the real world. However, the hospital it's set in is made up, half the procedures they do are either made up or exagerated. There are unspoken rules between the characters that are implicit worldbuilding, like they always act in the most extreme way possible to create the most conflict. Even if any drama could be resolved by simply sitting down, having a normal talk, and just listening to someone, they never actually do so.

Most genres have these kinds of unspoken rules that are as much about worldbuilding as about story. Spy thrillers use a spy world version of our real world, where you can always tell if someone's following you, and if you chase someone, you always know which street they went down, even if you have no idea where they're going. That sort of thing. Or if you create a romance story in a Western setting, then you need to make up your town, and the families who live in it. You need to develop the way people interact and what outside influences come to that town.

It's not as obvious as in Fantasy, but it's still there.

And yes, part of it is just research, but plenty of it counts as worldbuilding.