We chat about the gaps sometimes left in worldbuilding when people forget that all of society, geography, technology, etc. is connected. Think through your worldbuilding to make your writing better!
Catch Laura speaking and mentoring at: https://writersconduit.com/
Catch Alena speaking at http://casacon.nardio.net/
Video (from Twitch and YouTube):
[powerpress_subscribe]
Transcript:
Laura
Hello, good evening. Afternoon, morning things, whatever, so it is time for another to write and have written and tonight’s topic is about world building, specifically thinking through the implications of world building that sometimes we just kind of… miss. And so we’re going to talk about that in detail, but first I’m going to say something that I honestly I just never remember to say because I’m usually doing more exciting things here on the stream, which is that, hey, you can follow or subscribe or if you would like to support this stream. And if you if you’re on Amazon Prime, you can subscribe on Twitch for free. And then I get paid and you don’t have to pay me. And that’s fantastic. If you’re on YouTube or if you’re listening to the podcast and you want to throw a couple of bucks into my Ko-Fi or coffee or whatever, you want to say any of those things. Anyway, there are lots of ways to support this stream, but honestly, I do not because it makes me money, because it really, really doesn’t. But it would be great if it did anyway.
Laura
So there we go with all that said. OK, OK. Hey, thanks, chat, the chat is enjoying my lipstick, thank you. I really I was having some fun with that too and yeah. OK, so let’s bring in our very special guest for tonight, Kermit Voice. Yay! So a very special guest tonight is my sister. Yeah, yeah. This is Alena and she’s been in the chat with you guys.
Laura
But Alena and I occasionally start talking about things together. This is a thing that we sometimes do. We talk a lot. We talk a lot. And this spring we just got hit with a barrage of just poorly timed, everything came together of media with — I’m just going to generalize and say, there were some gaps in the world building.
Laura
Oh, Bridger is saying, tell you hi. Yay!
Laura
So. I was going to do this talk anyway. Turns out Alena is doing something very similar to this talk in, what, 10 days or something? We’ll talk, we’ll link to that at the end. So so we decided to chat together so we could play off each other and feed each other with additional examples. And then, please, of course, as always, discussion from the chat is welcome and encouraged. But this way, instead of just listening to me lecture on things for an hour, you get to see me enthuse and throw things, because that’s usually how it ends up when Alena and I get on a roll.
Laura
So, yeah, so. So when we’re talking about world building, we are here speaking specifically for you. I’m going to say specifically for speculative fiction, but it doesn’t actually have to be that way. Like thrillers and mysteries will also need to rely on some real world building. I mean, honestly, contemporary romance does a little bit, but it’s going to you know, it’s usually borrowing from our own world. So there’s not as much to build. You still need some explanations of things.
Laura
But what we’re talking about tonight specifically, I am creating an environment, a culture. You know, I am building the setting for my for my story and. You’ve heard me say a few times, I hear that everything is connected. Alena is a good a good one to jump in on this, because Alena and I, she’s she she showed me the Dirk Gently mini series and we played from it. And so we got all the everything is connected going on.
Laura
But but it’s really, really, really true. And there’s a reason I bring it up a lot in fiction and in worldbuilding because everything does affect everything else. And I think sometimes people just think of a cool feature or think of a cool scene, and then they just put that in the story without having any idea how it got there. Even if the rest of the world would make that improbable, implausible or impossible, so. Yeah, so I’m going to start with one that Alena and I both experienced and Alena feel free to jump in at any point here, but this
Alena
I can add sound effects.
Laura
You can make the sound effects. This was at a tabletop game. So commercial, commercial entity, all of these are traditionally published projects. And so Alena and I are in in a player group and we approach this little log cabin that is built in a forest by the river. And, you know, so we cross the river. It is a river. It is wet because it is a river. We cross the river. We go into this cabin where we promptly discover there’s a hidden door that goes to an underground passage and miles and miles of tunnels hidden underneath this cabin by the river.
Laura
Alena, would you like to say anything?
Alena
They are earthen tunnels, they’re not like magic stone tunnels, they are dug out of the earth straight down.
Laura
Somebody with a trowel and a lot of time has dug these underneath the cabin.
Alena
Yeah, that the first drop was 30 feet. And then there was a network of tunnels stretching out, radiating out into the surrounding countryside from this cabin by the river. With an earthen bank.
Laura
So we’re starting with an example with ordinary Earth physics. Which kind of got suspect because water goes down. That’s how rivers work? Another one, and this is this is going to fall more into fact checking, rather than world building, but we played another game where some robbers attacked a caravan or something and they spooked some horses and the horses ran for three days and three nights nonstop to reach another village where the players were supposed to learn that something had happened. And so and we went back to travel for, I don’t know, four days, whatever to get to where the incident happened, but I’m just like, we can’t be on the right track, this has to be wrong.
Laura
This has to be wrong. There’s no way we could be on the right track to solve this mystery, to find the solution or whatever, because those horses ran into the village, and they would have had to run for three days and three nights nonstop to to make this happen. And actually, in that particular case, while Alena and I were at the table playing that, the writer of that scenario came by and it’s like, how are you enjoying the game?
Laura
And I’m like, I’m so confused. We can’t be in the right place. And he’s like, well, how do you know that? There’s no way the horses would have run… And he’s like, horses run when they’re scared. And I’m like, oh my gosh.
Alena
Horses run like 30 feet when they’re scared and then stop running. Horses can’t run for three days without stopping.
Laura
Pulling wagons the whole time. Yeah. And and then we got the then we got the whole thing of I will explain to the people who grew up with horses and work in animal behavior for a profession Why I, who watched a movie once that had a horse in it, know better about it. Anyway, that was a thing. But all this to say is in this case, you know, those scenarios, those were things that were really not just wrong, but disruptive to the media consumption experience, because I knew we couldn’t be on the right track because the behavior was wrong, we knew we couldn’t be in this location because we should have been drowning. And so the fact that we weren’t meant that we weren’t actually where we thought were, because we had to suspend physics. So, yeah, sorry. I’m just really enthusing. Alena, if you want to jump in, feel free.
Alena
I mean, I can’t actually reach over and slap you to interrupt at this point because we’re a couple of miles apart. But yeah, that the the core of worldbuilding, it all starts with basic fact checking whether or not your world is rooted in the same physics or nature as our world, things have to be consistent. And if you are in a world with, say, gravity, then everything needs to obey the laws of gravity. If you are in a world with, you know, certain properties, make sure that all of your different elements obey those properties.
Alena
And in the case of something like, there are earthen tunnels that go under a river, there needs to be an in-world explanation for why those tunnels aren’t full of water, because usually tunnels under a river become underground rivers and things like simple fact checking. Like if you’re writing a murder mystery, look up when rigor mortis sets in. If you are writing about animals, look up how those animals behave, look up how those animals interact with their environment.
Alena
The classic one and the one that frequently kicks me out of movies because everybody in Hollywood does this wrong: If there is an animal and they want it to look like a scary animal, like, let’s say a wolf is stalking someone in the woods, Hollywood has this idea that the wolf needs to be snarling and slavering and RAWR all the time. Animals who are hunting you don’t make noise, because it’s a really stupid thing for a predator to make noise and scare off the prey it’s trying to sneak up on. So something like, oh, this is a big, scary predator, maybe have it be big and scary because it’s now frozen in a crouch and it’s ready to pounce on you rather than our heroes hear an animal roaring and know they’re being hunted, because hunting animals in any any environment don’t make noise.
Laura
Attention organizers, I have an entire workshop on this topic, the end.
Alena
But, you know, just look up how things work in this world and use that as a basis for understanding how things should work in any other world, even if they’re different. You have magical properties. You have different gravity because you’re on a different planet or something. It still needs to obey basic laws of how things work.
Laura
Yeah, and I want to make two distinctions really quickly. First, there is a difference between fact checking and world building. We’re going to talk about both, but like it is totally possible to have rocks float in your world. We just need to talk about the consistency and what we can expect around that, which we can do here in just a second. And then what was the other one? I distracted myself with floating rocks. Oh, it’s gone now. Huh.
Laura
Anyway, so, for example, let’s talk about floating rocks, because I thought thought of this when I said that, but we rewatched Escaflowne not that long ago, which is a lot of fun and has floating rocks, which they use to power their airships. So, cool. But why that works is those floating rocks are consistent. They make sense within the world and we know the technology — I don’t have a clue how floating rocks work, none whatsoever. It’s never actually explained. But we know that they will heat and cool the stones to get more or less levitation for their airships. Hey, there’s a system. You know what? I don’t understand how my refrigerator works either. But there’s a system. Therefore, I believe it. Okay.
Bridger’s in the chat: Alert! Alert! I am on my way to consume you and also very stealthy!
Alena
Yes, the T-Rex Rex is growling at you right now. Yeah, and on that note, with the floating rocks, one of the things that makes that believable in that universe, not only that they have a system in how they use it, but they don’t go out of their way to notice it and explain it to the audience. It’s just mentioned, incidentally, that there are, oh, we need to apply more heat to the levi-stone or whatever.
Alena
You know, in our daily life, if we’re on a planet with gravity, we don’t walk down the sidewalk and say, hey, person on the sidewalk. Did you notice that we’re not floating up in the air? That’s because our planet has gravity. You know, it can be part of the life and it’s accepted. But we don’t have to take us out of the story to explain. Look, I mean, a new thing. It just is an incidental part of life that the characters expect.
Laura
Yeah, and you can, I mean, that’s a great craft technique to get stuff in your world, is just have your characters treat it as normal and then the reader assumes it’s normal. You know, if if a rock is floating and I’m like a floating rock? I’m going to assume this is unusual. And, you know, I need I need more information about it. But if you’re like, oh, man, we got a crack in the levi-stone, we’re having to apply double amount of heat to it, so we’re not going to get this far without running out of fuel. What do we want to do about it? I’m just going to buy the levi-stone because everything else is, you know, it makes sense. It holds together.
Laura
So I really wish I could remember the other thing I was going to say. I’m sure it was really good. So come back. But but yeah. So fact checking versus worldbuilding, fact checking would be, you know, horses don’t actually run three days and three nights pulling wagons without stopping because something made a noise. That’s. Pretty basic fact checking.
Laura
World building would be, my rocks are floating, how does that affect the world? Do all the rocks float? In which case, why do we have a planet? OK, do some rocks float, which rocks float and how are they used? And most importantly, what’s that going to do to the society here? In Escaflowne, they power airships. Awesome. But in you know what else is going to happen? Because if I guarantee you if we had floating rocks in our society, there would be some things that are different because of that.
Alena
Everything in a society is connected, especially technology, with the way that people groups interact with the way that people will use those things, utilize them in their daily life. One of my several jobs is I do historic preservation. I’m on the board of a historic preservation organization. And if you look at some of the artifacts in our museum or you know, you just start looking at history in general in any society, the technologies, every time something new becomes available, society shifts and incorporates a new technology.
Alena
And in many cases, rather than we have a problem and we need to figure out how to solve that problem. So let’s look at all of our options. People, you know, they have a hammer, so they start using hammers, they have floating rocks, so they start using floating rocks. But every other element of society will feel the ripple effect from that change in technology. So, you know, if you look at just in just in the couple of hundred years that America has been around, we had different stages in transportation technology.
Alena
So we had feet, we had horses. You know, the Spanish lost some horses. They became Mustangs. The Mustangs were caught. They were tamed. Now we have horses to ride. We have horses to pull our wagons. You then had different improvements in technology for like wagon wheels versus, you have metal wheels instead of wood wheels. Then you get things like the steam railroad, then you upgrade to other types of engines. And, you know, over the decades you see the improvement in those things.
Alena
And now we have, you know, really efficient electric cars. We have different types of rail transportation. We have airplanes, but society changes based on what’s available. So it used to be even even just back in the 1940s and 50s, if you wanted to order a product, you would have an address that you would write a snail mail letter to saying, please send me a catalog. You would mail it. It would get there in a couple of weeks. They would send you a catalog. It would get there in a couple of weeks. You would decide what you want, make your order, mail it back. It would get there in a couple of weeks and the company would ship your product and it would get to you in a couple of weeks.
Alena
Now, because we have airplanes and other things and faster communication, we don’t write snail mail letters to ask for a catalog. We get on the Internet, order it, and we have Amazon prime and it ships to us in forty eight hours.
Alena
Our expectations change because the technology is available. So any time you make a fundamental change to the way that society operates, whether that’s communication technology, whether that’s transportation, whether that’s medical science, there are going to be effects in the expectations. The people who live in that society and in the way that all living is done, the way the the way that business is done, the way that trade happens.
Laura
And equally important, we we adapt and we change expectations and we change our standards. But we also don’t just like drop a break in history. Like everything that’s happened still carries over, which is why our cars are two horse butts wide. And that’s why, you know, I’m got–
Alena
Thank the Romans for that. Literally.
Laura
I’ve got a keyboard. You know, this is not an efficient keyboard layout that we’re using. That’s I don’t know. What is that, a hundred fifty years old at this point or something?
Alena
Eighteen thirty. So almost 200.
Laura
Yeah, like a long ways back that we’re still using a not terribly efficient layout because that’s what we did two hundred years ago. And why would we change that just because the keys no longer get stuck? Yeah. OK, so just being aware that everything is connected and there’s got to still be continuity.
But let me jump back on, like, why for a minute, just because this isn’t just so I can look smart, although that’s nice if that happens. This is also about being fair to your customer, I guess, to your reader or to your player. When we, you know, if I go into a log cabin by the river, I’m not thinking I need to search for an earthen passage underneath that house because, well, that would be dumb. And so to be like, well, you know, obviously the players need to figure this out. No, that’s an unfair expectation.
Laura
I don’t know where we’re supposed to be finding the clue about the robbers, because we’re way too far away, because the horses wouldn’t have run for four days. OK, that’s unfair to the player. And, you know, another example that I’ll give and I’ll qualify my examples in just a moment, but, you know, I I read a book recently where you have a person who’s and this has been changed, but the Mad Libs are the same, that the basic concept is the same.
Laura
You’ve got a person who is on a boat, on a water planet. This person has never seen land. This culture does not have land. They live on boats, on water planets, on the water planet. But they use gemstones for jewelry. And so as a reader, I’m like, oh, this is the mystery, like we have secret ancient aliens. There’s a secret mainland somewhere. There’s something going on where people are mining these gemstones. And that’s what I need, as a reader, that’s what I need to be looking for and figuring out. This is what’s actually going on. No, no, it has nothing to do with that. We just got gemstones and forgot to mention where they came from or anything like that.
Alena
They grow on boats now.
Laura
They grow on boats. And there’s no metal anywhere in this world. But we have gemstones. And so but that’s unfair to set that up for the, the reader who’s paying attention has now been misled. So this is one of the reasons that we actually care. We want to make these things. We want to be careful about these things.
So let me qualify my examples now for a moment. I have some rules about things that I will and won’t criticize in a public venue. And it generally has to do with how many millions of copies it has sold. So I figure [creator] is not going to be terribly hurt if I say I wasn’t a huge [franchise] fan because one, she’s got way better things to do than watch my stream, and two, if she does watch my stream and hears me say that, she can cry all the way to the bank and then blow her nose on a thousand dollar bill. Like she’s not really hurt in any way, by what you know, if I say something like that. If it’s something that is not a household name, I try not to, you know, to bash it or, you know, say negative things.
Laura
So for these examples, the games ones like those are so vague, like I’m not remotely going to — those are all like straight as, told as actually happened. But also you can’t identify the company or the writer from those. There’s a lot of underground passages in tabletop gaming. But the the book and and other references that we’ll be using tonight, I have mad libbed some nouns in. So, you know, the gemstones weren’t really gemstones, but they are now because they are still the same concept. It’s just I’ve made it so that you can’t track where it came from. So that’s my example. So I just wanted to explain that.
Alena
But also and this is jumping back to your point that you made just a second ago, if you have a thing where something is not internally consistent or something is not well explained, sometimes it can boot the reader or player or whatever out of the moment and you lose the suspension of disbelief. And one example from very recently we watched Back to the Future. Recently, the Historic Artcraft Theater showed Back to the Future and a big group of us went and watched it.
Alena
And it’s a great, everybody loves Back to the Future. It’s a really good movie. It’s held up really well. And in the movie, I’m assuming you’ve seen it. But if you haven’t, there’s time travel.
Laura
Spoilers, for the 35 year old movie.
Alena
Yeah, yeah. Someone from 1955 gets ported back to 1955. And one of the things he has with him is a video camera. And of course this movie is built on, we are going to suspend all the disbelief because you can turn a 1985 sports car into a time machine by throwing a reactor in the back of it and a bunch of stuff happens. And yeah, you just go into the movie and you suspend all that disbelief.
Alena
But somebody who is watching the movie with me had a moment where they were booted out of the suspension of disbelief briefly because the character takes his 85 camera recording and hooks it up to someone’s television in 1955 to show them what’s on the cassette tape. And he said, wait a minute, how did he hook up a 1985 camera to a 1955 TV? Like they don’t have the same kind of connectors. You can’t just plug that in.
Alena
So that’s a moment where we can hand wave it in Back to the Future because you’ve got a super brilliant genius scientist who invented time travel, and I’m assuming he had some wires and worked something out. But in a book setting or in something where it’s not really well explained, a thing like that where you may not even realize it’s a problem when you just OK. Yeah. You know, TV camera, we hook the camera up to the TV. It’s fine because people can do that in 1985.
Alena
But that’s where something like do I need to fact check what kind of connectors. 1955 TVs that weren’t designed for VCR head on them. You know. Is it, is it just using an over the antenna. Do I have a way to plug in an RCA cable. No I don’t. How am I going to work that out. My story. So sometimes even if you weren’t thinking about the fact that it would be a problem if your reader notices that, especially if it’s in a field where they’re trained.
Alena
And I I drove our GM crazy with the tunnels under the river because I studied geology in school and I’m like, no, you can’t have a tunnel here. This is what the strata would be. You can’t do this. It would have to be this kind of setup.
Laura
To be fair, you don’t need an advanced degree in geology to understand that water usually goes down.
Alena
This is true. But I was trying to figure out what we were supposed to take out of that experience. And I’m like, clearly this is not what it appears. And no, it was just a badly written scenario.
Laura
And that’s what I’m saying about being fair to your reader or to your player. Like, we’re assuming there has to be something else going on than what you’re telling us is going on.
Laura
So OK, so we’ve got Kate says we have gemstone barnacles, which I think is awesome, that that would be great actually. If you put gemstone barnacles in the world I would be like, cool, awesome. Like, yeah. And PJZooFit points out that there are pearls. And if they were pearls, I would be totally cool with that too. Like that at least, so in world that makes sense.
Alena
Maybe this world has aquatic ostriches and the ostrich ate some raw diamonds because they eat rocks for their gizzard. And so then the ostrich, which is now aquatic, swam to the boat people and coughed up some diamonds and they figured out they could bang them together and make them shiny. This is a lot of work to justify this.
Laura
Or there’s a rite of passage, a coming of age ceremony is to go hunt down this this aquatic ostrich, beat it in combat and take its gizzard rocks, which you then wear to demonstrate that you have done this coming of age ceremony.
Laura
So here’s the thing.
Alena
This is great worldbuilding.
Laura
Yeah. Nothing at all about, at no point is any of this to be like, well, you can’t do that fun thing. Like no, hello, this is spec fic, please do the fun thing! Just make sure it fits in the story. Like, give me a reason to think about it. And what really it comes down to is, because everything is connected, you know, whatever you put into your world is going to affect the other parts of the world.
Laura
So I’m thinking of another one and this is another one that I have Mad libbed the nouns and verbs. So we have the same concept, but it’s not a direct lift. But this is a world where the evil eye is real. So if I make eye contact with you, I can do you physical harm or even kill you with the evil eye. This has been the case in this culture for several hundred years, and yet nobody in this culture has invented sunglasses, a veil, or a hat with a brim.
Laura
So everybody is walking around just constantly dodging eye contact, because — No! We would have we would have sunglasses or like the shady hat, like all the villains wear, like they do this or whatever. Like we would have something to prevent somebody from standing on a rooftop and looking at you as you go by and instantly killing you. Like this is a thing.
Laura
Again, it’s not that you can’t, it’s not that you can’t do that. By all means, give me some eye contact of death. That’s a really fun concept. Just put it in, you know, like, oh man, you can get a lot of world building mileage out of this. Like oh, autumn is my least favorite time of year because that’s when the leaves fall from the trees. So now I can’t stand under a tree and know that nobody’s looking at me from a nearby rooftop or, you know, whatever, just that kind of thing.
Alena
So you can you can have escalation as well where you know. OK, so Group A has evil eye contact death glare, and Group B invents a hat out of straw to block the death glare. And so group A is like, OK, now we’re going to invent big fans to blow their hats off and Group B has to have cords on their hats now. So I have a trade opportunity for the people who make the rope to make the cords. So you can actually build a lot of complexity into that, if you just think about what’s the problem and how do I solve it.
Laura
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so again, you can do — and if you think through it, like chances are by the time you take that through a couple of degrees, you’ve created a much cooler world anyway. You know exactly what Alena was just saying. So yeah, just do what, do whatever you want. Just make sure you think through the implications of it. That’s really like the take home message.
Alena
So and you don’t have to spell that out. You know, you don’t have to have the character say, well, I’m sure glad I have my hat with the cord on it so nobody can blow my hat off today, because people don’t talk like that. But if you have a character whose hat cord breaks and that’s a crisis because that cord is broken, we know that it’s important that cords exist. Why do they exist? Well, because the hats would blow off otherwise.
Alena
So you can just drop little things in, have it be part of the world. So it makes sense. And you don’t have to have a whole long explanation rationalizing it all.
Laura
I like that by the end of this video, we’re going to have like a whole society of of evil eyes and hats and everything and aquatic ostriches. The guy who has sunglasses is going to blow away (I made a pun) but all the people, you know, because the sunglasses are more versatile and he can see out, whereas people who are shading their eyes with a hat cannot. So he’s got the advantage of. Yeah, yeah. You can just keep going with this.
Laura
And this is actually a point that I had in my notes to make later. But I’ll just make it now. One of the ways to make sure your worldbuilding is solid is to over create, because if I just think, oh, this is a world where people have the evil eye, I’m leaving open a lot of gaps for things like, well, why doesn’t anybody just cover their eyes? Like I’m not there.
But if I think through well, then this is how those people would respond to it. And this is the next step and this is the next step and this is the next step. Even if that never