Getting Started--Scope and Focus

Getting Started

So you're sitting in your comfy chair with a Shiny New Idea.  It's an epic story, with the glimmer of some great characters and one thing is certain--this is not happening in a Vanilla Setting. It's going to be full of cool places and interesting culture. You're going to need to do some world building. Definitely. You've decided that you're prepared for this.

Now what?

Now you have to answer two questions: How big is your world? and What level of World building are you going to do? 

How big is your world?

Hey. That's not funny. Stop laughing! The scope of a world is a very important part of world building! You can't start until you know if you're making a small town or a region or an intergalactic empire! 

To most seasoned World Architects, this question is so intuitive that we don't think about how we size our worlds. But it's actually quite complicated.

What if your story is set on a single street corner? You don't want to waste time designing a whole continent if you're never going to leave that corner, let alone the city.  On the other hand, if the entire world is the street corner, then where do your characters come from when they enter the street corner? Where do they go when they leave? Who lived in the house on that corner? You don't know, because that street corner is all that exists.

Different stories have different scopes. Therefore, different stories have differently sized settings. The first thing to decide when you're getting started designing your world is how big does it need to be to suit the scope of your story? A single house on a hill works for a ghost story, but what an epic fantasy probably requires at least a whole country.

Once you've figured out how big your world needs to be to fit your plot and characters, you have a foundation to use when looking at the next question:

What level of focus do you want to use?

Okay, admittedly, this is a weird way to phrase this question. A better one is: how much work do you want to do?

I've been working in a laser lab this summer. When doing analysis, we often use filters to regulate how much light gets in. If we let in too much light, the signal gets washed out. Too little and we don't see any signal to begin with.

Think of the light as the amount of world building you want to do. If you let too much world building into your story, you can wash out your epic plot and your interesting characters. If you don't let in enough, the plot doesn't shine through.  Just like different types of samples require different strengths of light in order to work, different stories are complemented best by different levels of world building. What level does your story need?

Now, because I'm a science person, society tells me that I like to quantify things. So, not to diss cultural constructs on a blog about World Building, let's make this whole focus thing a little less vague, shall we? Introducing!

The Highly Arbitrary Levels of World Building Focus 
(Note: As a Sci-fi/fantasy writer, I am heavily biased. I apologize.)

Level -1:  Your story is set in a real place/time with no additives. (What are you doing here? This requires research, not world building.)
Level  0: Your story is set in a fictional part of a real place/time. 
Level  1: Your story is set in a real place/time, but with some major modification. 
Level  2: Your story is set in a fictional place/time heavily, heavily borrowing from a real place in time. 
Level  3: Your story is set in a fictional place/time with similar ecology/physics to Earth, but otherwise quite different. 
Level  4: Your story is set in a world with an entirely new ecology/physics, but there exists many many parallels. 
Level  5: Your story is set in a society where the inhabitants are entirely inhuman.


Now to clarify, really good stories have been written in each and every one of these levels, and there's a lot of variation in how detailed the world is. Compare Harry Potter and Twilight for two stories squarely in level 1. A lot of epic fantasy is in counterpart culture Europe, making it level 2, Tamora Pierce is a good example. On the other hand, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein completely invents the Lunie society--a solid type 3. Dune is type 4 and so on. The authors use different focuses to tell very different stories. 

So what is your world?

Narvu is a continent-sized, level 4 world. I have lots of fun creating creatures and plants. 

An Introduction to World Building (And this Blog)

 What is World Building?

 The term "World Building" is a metaphor. There are no hammers involved. Clay is how out of the question and God forbid you end up with something you can hold afterward. Unfortunately, it's not even a very good metaphor.  

Because, you see, if your world was a building, then you aren't even metaphorically the guy pounding with the hammer, nor the guy welding the girder; you're not even the guy sitting on the hill looking at plans and shouting directions. 

Writers leave the building to someone else. The technical nitty-gritty details are something that no writer can take time for without boring the reader to death. Do we care that the building across the street is blue? No, we care that the mysterious man with the green bowler hat is parked out front, watching. So, maybe I thought the building was blue when I wrote about it, but it's been all sorts of different colors, different for everyone who reads about it. Nothing we ever write will come out picture perfect. Writing is not like art. If you paint a picture, and you asked everyone what it looks like, you would (Hopefully) get very similar answers. Every "building" that comes out of your story will be a little different, personalized to people the people who read the book. No, we don't really build anything. So what do we do?

Writers use words to paint pictures, feel out areas, create schematics--that each reader uses in their own head to build the world, by our instructions. You may not know what color the building is, but the man with the green bowler hat is parked out front, and he is watching. In every world, there is a street and a building across that street, and cars, and bowler hats. The layout of every world is the same. 

Writers are architects. And our work is World Design. 

Fine. Semantics. So, what is "World Design"?

Don't be silly. Everyone calls it world building--I'm not going to create some sort of Insistant Terminology in my first post. That would be ridiculous!

...Really?

But, oh, yes, definitions. 

World building is the designing of a setting--any setting--for a work of fiction. Setting includes time, place, and cultural context. When people talk about world building in conversation, they generally refer to the large-scale set design that goes on for making alternate cultures, especially in science fiction and fantasy works, but smaller scale world building happens in almost all fictional works.

But....why?

World building can include anything from deciding a character's ethnicity to drawing a basic layout of their house. People do it all the time while they write.

It is a method of making details consistent. If you don't know where things are, you might find the bathroom across the hall in chapter 3, and yet Julia has to run all the way downstairs to wash off the alien artifact in chapter 8. Or, your elven soldier might refuse to eat at a banquet on the grounds that he's vegetarian, even though you met him eating rabbit stew at a pub three chapters ago. These sorts of details are part of world building.  When you go back through the book, you remember which choices you make and then refer back to the "world" when things get inconsistent. 

But these sorts of little details are so trivial that doing world building as a separate exercise is hardly necessary. And the truth is that a lot of stories can be told without world building separately at all.

Why would you go out of your way to world build? Well, for starters, a lot of people prefer actual buildings to painted facades in their stories. A place that could actually exist. If you can mention details offhand that show you've done the work, readers will believe, well, that there's a whole world out there and your tale is only a tiny sliver of everything that's happening. 

And some stories don't work in a standard setting.  If The Hunger Games had starred "Katherine" and "Peter" as the American Government pulled random people from each of the 50 states to duke it out in Yellowstone, the plot would make no sense. You can't even describe Harry Potter and the Philosopher Stone without invoking magic or wizards. If the Pevensies had gone through a wardrobe into a world which was exactly the same, it just wouldn't be as much fun, would it?

Which brings me to my last point: World building outside of writing is a really fun!

All right. I'm sold. 

So why are we talking about this?

 My fantasy WIP The Book of Worlds began as a setting. In 7th grade, I was allowed to participate in a project from another class-- the "Create a World" Project, an analysis of Watership Down. Now, I've still never read Watership Down, but no project has ever affected my life as much this one I did for no credit on a lark. I learned about building languages, drawing maps, making food webs--And the result was the land of Narvu, still under construction.

The World Architect is my world building project. It's a place for me to talk about what I've learned in my 5-6 years working on my own world. Tips and articles and How to's for writers who are just beginning down their journey --and also posts about my active work on building Narvu, a land of death and decay and hope. 

So grab your pencils and meet me at the drafting table, there's a new world to explore.