Technique: Infusion of Wonder

[Svrtnsse]

To me fantasy is about escapism. It's about leaving reality behind and venturing into another world. I think that's one of the big things to me. It doesn't matter too much how different the world is to our real one, as long as its different. Heck, I even take modern day urban fantasy set in the real world and I'll enjoy it in the same way.

It's the escapism that does it for me. It's that things happen that couldn't ever possibly happen in my world.

So how do we create that escapist sensation? That feeling that pulls us in and makes us accept as real something that couldn't ever happen in reality? How do we create believable words that feel as if they really could exist even though they never could?

How do we infuse our stories with wonder?
What do you do to bring your worlds you've created to life?

(and can we try and not make this a discussion about realism, please?)

 

[Svrtnsse]

My philosophy at the moment is that the devil is in the details. There's something about how it's a lot easier to trust someone else's word about big complicated things we don't understand than about small simple things we're familiar with.
If someone tells you it's 1,600 miles to Distantville you'll probably just take their word for it, but if they tell you the bench is freshly painted, you'll be tempted to put a finger on it to check.

I think this is something we can make good use of in our writing. We don't really have to worry too much about the really big things because people aren't familiar with them, and they'll have an easier time just taking your word for it. When you're dealing with little details though, things people are familiar with - or THINK they are familiar with - that's when you have to make sure you get it right.

 

[Svrtnsse]

Another pet peeve of mine is explanations.

If you're telling someone it's 1,600 miles to Distantville you're not going to also explain to them what a mile is, how society arrived on the mile as a unit of measurement, or why they are using miles instead of kilometers. You'll just tell them it's 1,600 miles and you're done. Everyone knows what a mile is and while not everyone will have a grasp of just how far 1,600 miles is, they'll still have the idea it's pretty far and you won't walk there in an afternoon.

 

[WooHooMan]

I think of fiction as a catharsis. I assume that's what most people mean when they say fiction is meant for escapism.
I was talking to a friend of mine about a video game and he said he didn't like it because of its morals and worldview. The game took place in a very pessimistic world where amoral characters are rewarded.
I'm okay with that because it may not be a great idea to actually adopt that kind of worldview in real-life. So, in fiction, I can experience that kind of life in a safe environment. And when that experience no longer appeals to me, I can put the book down or stop playing the game or whatever.

I think that humanity as a whole has a desire to explore. Way back in the day, there were continents and civilization left to explore but today, we kind of know what every place is like. I guess space and the microscopic plane still can use exploring but looking through a telescope or a microscope isn't as exciting as getting on a horse or a boat and heading into the unknown. So, we're left exploring constructed settings. Which is fine. I'm cool with this frontier being fictional.

How do we create believable words that feel as if they really could exist even though they never could?
What fun is that? I'd rather explore an unbelievable world.
Also, I think the answer is internal logic and consistency.

That feeling that pulls us in and makes us accept as real something that couldn't ever happen in reality?
I find that proxies/pov are the best/easiest way. That's why a lot of people say that characters are the be-all-end-all of a story. If the character believes the world and the reader believes the character, then I think the reader will believe the world.

How do we infuse our stories with wonder? What do you do to bring your worlds you've created to life?
My solution is mystery. I think you should try to get the audience to realize the world is deeper than they think and they should want to find-out more.

So, there's my input.

 

[X Equestris]

Another pet peeve of mine is explanations.

If you're telling someone it's 1,600 miles to Distantville you're not going to also explain to them what a mile is, how society arrived on the mile as a unit of measurement, or why they are using miles instead of kilometers. You'll just tell them it's 1,600 miles and you're done. Everyone knows what a mile is and while not everyone will have a grasp of just how far 1,600 miles is, they'll still have the idea it's pretty far and you won't walk there in an afternoon.

Agreed. I read an article about infodumps this morning, and it made pretty much the same point you did. There's no need for that much irrelevant detail. And if there is something important tucked away in that infodump, you should be able to establish it without the extra fluff.

 

[evolution_rex]

Exposition definitely can ruin any sense of wonder. I give only information necessary to the story with little hints to the rest of the world through dialogue or by describing what's in front of them. I never try to turn my story into a history book unless it's for a specific character.

 

[Russ]

I agree with you the devil is in the details. A well drawn setting makes the reader feel like they are there, and if the descriptions are evocative enough than they will forget about their more mundane surroundings.

I find one of the better ways to achieve this is to engage more senses. We get lots of sight and sound in our prose, but I think we need more smell, taste and tactile awareness to complete the effect.

 

[Feo Takahari]

Something I've realized in playing video games: the more beautiful the landscape on the horizon, the more I wish I could explore it, but the more of the world I'm allowed to explore, the more boring exploration gets. I think the same might be true when books provide a "guided tour" of a world. A Tolkien quote comes to mind:

Part of the attraction of the L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed."

 

[Svrtnsse]

[...]the more of the world I'm allowed to explore, the more boring exploration gets.[...]

I'm glad you brought up games. It gives me a good reason to bring up World of Warcraft. I've played the game since it was released over 10 years ago. Every now and the the topic of the good old days is brought up and people reminisce about how good everything was back then when the game was new.

The thing is, it really wasn't better.

These days, as far as design decisions, game-mechanics, and technical aspects go, World of Warcraft is far superior to what it was ten years ago. Yet people still want to go back to the beginning and play the game like it was then, because they have such fond memories of how fun it was back then.
That's key. They had more fun. That's not something you can really argue with. What you can argue is why it was more fun. I don't think it's because the game was in any particular way better than it was back then. I think it's because the game was new.
Most people who played back then had never played a game quite like that before. They had no idea what they were doing and they had a vast game world to explore. That's where the fun came from.
You don't really hear people talking about how they miss fishing for Stonescale Eels in Azshara for hours on end so that the tank could have a flask that disappeared as soon as they died. You hear people talk about that one time when Haqin and Xeno ran all the way from Ratchett to Gadgetzan in the middle of the night because they had heard there was a goblin there and they'd never seen one before - or that one time Garryback got thrown into the whelps on Onyxia and wiped the raid, etc etc etc.

The fun didn't come from the game being better, it came from it being unexplored.

These days, every single aspect of the game has been explored into its tiniest detail and everyone is expected to know everything. There is nothing left to explore and you don't even have to play the game to see the new content because it's all on youtube anyway.
These days, people play for different reasons, and it's a different kind of fun, but they miss the old days, and they don't really understand why the makers of the game won't make it as it was back then.

Like Feo says, there's a lot to be said for leaving things unexplored and unexplained. It tickles the imagination and makes us wonder, and when we wonder we come up with answers that are far more fantastic than the actual truth.

 

[FifthView]

One thing I realized shortly after the first LOTR movie was released, and then confirmed with the next two movies, was this: A great deal of its success rests on the decision that Jackson made to show the characters within the movie in states of awe. For instance, when they enter that area of Moria with all the tall columns stretching forever in every direction, all the characters are looking around in absolute awe of the scene. By the third movie, when at the end the Fellowship reacts in utter awe at the eruption of of Mt. Doom in something like shock while realizing Frodo and Sam are probably on/in Mt. Doom, the deal was sealed for me. Jackson succeeded because he allowed the characters within the movie to experience awe; he showed them experiencing awe; and we who are watching the movie end up experiencing awe even more, because we sympathize with the characters.

I think that if you can show your characters experiencing awe, you can expand the sense readers will have of the wondrousness of the fictional world you've created. While it's true that characters within the world will be somewhat jaded with it because so much of their world is known to them already — they take it for granted — you can introduce the little twists that cause surprise, shock, etc., and show your characters experiencing "the new" of your world (what is new to them; or maybe they see things in a new light.) Sometimes of course it's easier if you have a novice as a p.o.v. character. But then again, even the more experienced traveler Aragorn was often taken aback during the events of LOTR.

 

[Creed]

I'm pretty sure it's some kind of maxim that humankind is enthralled by the unknown. That includes pretty much all humans, like the readers and the characters (excepting other races with different worldviews) and, as seen above, us writers too. Heck, I'm almost 20 years old and murky waters still make me nervous. If I can't see the bottom of the water I'm going to mentally struggle to get into it.

For me, the big sources of wonder are ancient history and magic.

If you have ruins from sprawling civilisations that reached the apex of their glory thousands of years ago, and are now shrouded in the deep and heavy mists of time, I'm instantly a little intrigued. If you have a plot that extends to details of mysterious events that unfolded before humankind could read, I am instantly starving for more details. If you unfurl the petals of a vast and complex narrative five thousand or two million years in the making, with me and the beloved characters part of it, ever growing closer to that wondrous, climactic, bombastic epiphany... I am not going to want to put the book down. Ever.

That's my goal, and it's why the ancient history of my Universe has been building layers of detail and mystery over the past five years. Occasionally (last one was like in November) I'll reach an epiphany regarding events of my world several million years before humanity even began domesticating wildlife and I'll be thrown into an absolute, giddy shock. I am exploring the unknown, unlocking secrets and unraveling primordial mysteries just like my characters are.

Same for magic (minus the epiphanies, maybe). I love learning the details of well-written systems, but the power of a little mystery in magic is crucial. I love details. I love exploring the complexities of what my magic systems are capable of, and comprised of, and what I don't yet know.

How do we infuse our world with wonder, then?
Find what phenomena/mysteries make you hungry for more details, and then put your characters through the process of exploring things like it. And of course, write them along to those earth-shattering epiphanies. Or at least that's what I'd say.

It's a large part of why I love the Malaz books, and the Second Apocalypse series, and the Witcher games, and the sections of the Dragon Age games where I am getting a glimpse into what happened in the Golden City over 1,300 years ago.

Write the surface beautifully, but let them know there's so much more beneath it.

 

[The Stranger]

finding something that will really draw a person in can be difficult but i think its best done with a combination of freedom and restriction, using them in different ways. for instance, if you've got fantastical creatures and a beautiful world to explore, just let the reader fully experience that, and give them as much detail as you can to fully flesh out that beautiful setting. But if all you do is make a really cool world and say "go nuts" people are likely to get bored with it fast, and that's where the restriction of information comes in. you want to let your reader know that the world is much deeper than only whats around him. its why games like skyrim and dragon age liter the world with books and old scrolls for the player to read to get a better grasp on the world outside of the setting they're confined to. it makes the world feel even bigger and more alive if you hear about some of the history of the world that led the current events of the story to happen, or even completely unrelated lore going on elsewhere in the world. this isn't easy to do, and it can be easily messed up if you restrict too much of this other lore, as people will just write it off and not care at all.