Podcast: Play in new window
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):
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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 goes in the book — it probably definitely shouldn’t go out in that kind of encyclopedic detail — but it means that I thought through and I’ve already caught all the gaps so that my reader or player or viewer or whatever does not have to.
Alena
So you don’t always have to explain to your readers why something exists or how something works. But it’s important for you as the writer to know it exists or know why it works. You know, and in the answer could be because a wizard did it. But then you have to have an internally consistent magic system, if that’s the answer. So, you know, it’s a good idea to just think about, even if it’s just for your own personal notes while you’re creating this world.
Alena
OK, so they have this thing or I need to resolve this sort of problem. What are ways I can do that? And then how would that work? And as long as it’s all internally consistent within the structure of that world, you don’t have to put it in every stage, every step along the way. But it’s a good idea to think through it as the writer, as Laura said.
Laura
And then just real quick, I see Kate’s in the chat asking about buffering. Yeah, I’m seeing that we’re having some buffering issues and I have everything at my end shut down that’s not the stream. So I don’t know what’s going on with that.
Alena
I will say that for the past week, in fact, my stream died halfway through last week. And then on a zoom call, I got kicked off a zoom call. Our upload in this area has been terrible and I don’t know if Comcast had a line go down or what, but I think it’s a regional problem.
Laura
OK, so, yeah, and that’s where I was going is, there’s nothing more I can do over here, but it will be recorded locally and therefore have a clean recording. So that will go up for the future.
So, let me check on the chat real quick and then we’ll catch up with the next item. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, OK, so Bridger has, the main country in my current work in progress has a religious prohibition against keeping any domesticated livestock, poultry, beast of burden, meat, fur, nothing ever, any quantity, any reason. And let me tell you, that completely changes with generic fantasy countryside looks like in a billion tiny ways that you wouldn’t expect.
Yeah. So. When I’m when I’m doing Shard of Elan and just the way that started coming together, I realized I needed to have a really different labor economy and I realized that the reason we have this really different labor economy in my world is because we don’t have any large domesticated mammals. There’s basically nothing bigger than a goat.
Laura
So your cattle, your horses, everything. Now we do have some horses that are brought in from another, at least another continent. And they’re very fragile and they don’t do well here and they are hard to reproduce here. So they’re ridiculously expensive. So you don’t use them for labor. So the labor economy is still holding up the way. But yeah. So that now let me run through and like everything where, you know, in the old typical Renaissance Fair Fantasy Village and people are eating beef stew. Nope. We can’t hey, we don’t have cows.
Alena
And leather is going to be a lot more expensive because you’re having to hunt for it rather than just raising cows and and using a byproduct of the meat.
Laura
Right. So you’ve probably got pig leather and goat leather, but those are not the same, you know, in either in quantity or quality. And so, yeah, everything about that is changing and that’s going to drive all of your economic shifts.
Alena
And this is something that, you know, being a an observer of history or looking things up relating to history can really help you. This is something that a lot of people don’t associate with things like farms and livestock. But if you look at the historical development of plagues, almost all epidemics type plagues developed from historically speaking, we’re not going to talk about covid-19 because nobody wants to think about current events right now anyway. We’re talking about fantasy. But, you know, if you’re looking at something like the bubonic plague or something that that would have been brought over to the new world by Europeans, but that’s decimated native populations in the Western Hemisphere. Most of those plagues historically were developed from contact with domesticated large mammals like horses and cows.
So if you have a culture where you don’t have any domesticated livestock, it’s very unlikely that you would have a plague type scenario where a disease would transfer to humans and sweep through a population. So in that culture, unless you have another reason for there to be a plague that has been developed, whether it’s magical in nature or there’s some other in-world explanation for it, the things that developed in society as a direct result of plague conditions, which we have a lot of those, and I could do a whole two hour seminar just on that, would not necessarily have developed the same way because you wouldn’t have plagues because you don’t have domestic mammals.
Alena
So that’s something that you’re not going to spell all that out in your story. But it’s a good idea to think about how it would affect your history of your world and society.
Laura
Yeah. And Bridger also is helping us out with our evil eye escalation war here. We’ve got mirrors that we flash at an angle so I can easily see somebody around the corner when they’re not expecting it. Like this would be an advantage of having the sunglasses close, more coverage rather than the hat, which you can get around to see. Like this is all you have.
Alena
You have mirrored lenses. And then when they try to evil eye you, it bounces and it evil eyes them and they die instead.
Laura
Or that guy down the street who just happened to be at the wrong refractive angle.
Alena
We never liked that guy.
Laura
Like, a war starts. And now I have my inciting incident. Like there’s so much we can do.
Alena
We accidentally started a war because your evil eye bounced off my mirrored sunglasses and hit the diplomat from another country and they think we assassinated him. And now there’s a war.
Laura
Right. And and I just like these are things that honestly, this is why we do spec fic, because we get to invent stuff, but then go ahead and actually invent this stuff. You know, think about, if I have flying creatures, they don’t live in ranch one story houses with a garage attached. Like they fly, like give them ways they can access from the top and and how do they keep their privacy in their in their patios if their neighbors are flying over them all the time?
Laura
So what do you have. Like I put glittery nets on top of things. That’s what I did in my world. But there’s a few other ways you can handle this. Like, these are just things you have to think about.
Alena
And as an example, I have in one of my stories, I have a world where it’s basically a civilization that lives in caverns so they don’t have trees. They can grow small plants, but they can’t get lumber, so they can’t make doors out of wood. So they have a completely different societal representation and interaction system with doors. Instead of knocking on a door, they clap their hands outside a barrier of cloth or something else. So just what is available? How does that incorporate?
Laura
Yeah. Again, I’m drawing a distinction between fact checking and world building. Fact checking is, oh please, I’m just going to pick on another one that came up recently. Oh, no. She’s thirty six weeks pregnant and the baby’s premature. Stop, stop, stop.
Alena
Please enter into Google: how many weeks does pregnancy last?
Laura
Right. So, you know, that’s just fact checking. And it’s going to throw your your reader out and lose the flow of the story. But then worldbuilding would be, you know, in a world where thirty six weeks of pregnancy is premature, what else in society changes because of that?
Alena
So maybe you have two different strains of humanity and one of them has a normal nine month, normal for US, nine month pregnancy and the other strain of humanity, because they’re magic users, their pregnancy normally lasts 10 months. And so it would be slightly premature. Maybe it lasts two years instead of 10 months because they have a hard time reproducing. And so it’s very premature, you know, but there has to be a reason for it. It can’t just be, I didn’t bother googling how long a pregnancy is, which honestly, like the Internet exists. Just look things up, please.
Laura
It’s really easy these days, guys, like we used to have card catalogs, now you can use your phone. It’s really easy.
The other thing is when you start thinking through, like, how does this society go together? How do these two different societies fit together? You know, when you start really going through things, you can get so much more story potential. Out of this, so I’m going to mention that the Korean drama Kingdom, which I think is on Netflix now, has been for a year or two, and it’s basically zombies in medieval Korea.
Laura
And so that’s concept. It’s the story. The writing is pretty good. There’s a lot of stuff I really liked about it. But there was something that I caught as a viewer that I don’t think the average Western viewer would have caught, which is at this period in Goryo culture, it was a very Confucianist society. One of the values in that Confucianist culture is you honor the body that your parents gave you. And so there’s and there’s lots of prohibitions on bodily harm. And you see this coming out in other ways, long hair so that people are not cutting the hair, to honor, they’re not changing the body that was given to them. And there is some suggestion that the that the death of a thousand cuts, which has been turned into culturally, you know, kind of a reference, almost a reference joke. But the original thing of that was not just a means of torture and execution, but was specifically that look at the damage we’re doing to a body, you know, so it was a great taboo. It was a horror. It was a taboo way to die, as well as just a horrible way to die.
Laura
So that’s like the the cultural things that are bound up in this Confucianist society. Hey, we now have put zombies into it. How do we kill zombies? OK? Like, not only do you have the zombies, zombies are bad. Oh, I have to kill somebody. I know that’s bad. I have to do a horrible cultural taboo to a person I know in order to stop the zombie. Like there is a whole nother level to that, to putting a zombie in that culture compared to what it would be in ours.
Laura
And again, I don’t think that was something that everybody necessarily in America watching would have caught on to. But I was like, oh, my gosh, this just took the conflict and cranked it to 11, because what do you do if you’re, you know, raised with those kind of, you know, cultural rules?
Laura
So, yeah, anyway, lots of lots of things to think about. So, yeah, Bridger’s got some really great examples about the livestock in, you know, or no livestock in the society: they sleep in the barn for a night in the barn. What barn? He jumps over the fence. What fence? Keeping what in? Like, everything is different when you when you change stuff. These are really good.
Alena
And things like, how do you, if you don’t have domestic animals, how do you get your goods to market? You know, if you if you need to travel long distances, what is your method? Do you just walk? Is there some sort of transportation system? So it all connects to other elements of society.
Laura
Yeah. And so, you know, again, like for me, that’s what I that’s where I had my slave labor economy and, you know, the things that how how we would have picked up the slack if we had no beast of burden and the social implications of that. And yeah, anyway, that’s the thing that we’re not here to just talk about this, but let’s let’s spend a little time talking about ways to really fill out this world building and make sure we’re considering multiple angles so —
WorkAppropriateGoth, it’s for the hay!
Alena
Why are we growing hay? Are we stuffing our mattresses with hay? Is that why we’re harvesting hay?
Laura
So one thing I will point out is that, pretty much everything has already been done. And I don’t mean in fiction, like there is no new idea. I mean, in history. Humans have been around for a while and we keep trying things and sometimes it works out really well and sometimes it really doesn’t. So when you’re coming up with a scenario, don’t just try to think through the first degree of it on your own.
Laura
Look at history where the people put a lot of not just hypotheticals into it, but they actually tried to make it work and see what worked out for them. And, you know, sometimes they because when time and money are like real things that, you know, you have to spend actual resources on something you find the most efficient way to do it. And you figure out real quickly that mirrored lenses are way better than walking around with a hand over your eye. Right? Because now I have two hands to use, so.
Laura
So that’s anyway, all that to to say that history is your best friend. So saturate yourself in history. You can totally nerd out and watch documentaries and read nonfiction and all of those things, or you can just become interested in a specific component of something you’re trying to do. But absolutely. Sorry, I’m getting distracted. We have a whole culture like war going on in the chat.
Laura
The hay is used as bait to attract wild animals. We hunt them for their skins. That comes from Joe. So we’re doing all the things.
Laura
But anyway. Yeah, so. I I’m a nerd, I’ll just admit that up front, but, you know, recently, nonfiction books, I read a book on anthropodermic bookbinding. I read a book on rabies — and realizing that just also Korean zombies, like I just sound really terrifying and horrible right now.
Alena
Don’t look at our Google search history, whatever you do.
Laura
Do not. Yeah. Let me tell you about my actually, both of those came from the library. No one of those came from the library. I got my anthropodermic bookbinding and rabies. And yeah, it looks like I should have a secret lab in the basement at this point. Anyway, all of that to say, the more I put into my hopper, the more material I have to work with.
Laura
And what’s really funny is I just like, probably at this point two hours ago, I got a phone call from somebody, Theresa McKeon, who’s a co-founder of TAGteach International, which the extremely short version of that is it’s clicker training for humans. It’s more complicated and cooler. But that’s the very short version. But we were setting up an interview, but she wanted my input on some technology and coaching and how things working together.
Laura
And we ended up talking and she’s like, yeah, I’m trying to try to find people who can explain how it’s easier to think outside the box if you have a lot of boxes. And and so I was like, well, I know that I work really well from the subconscious. So I just keep putting a lot of things in and then it comes out and it makes sense. And when we were talking about this and both of us realized that we both believe really strongly in this concept, we had no idea. So now we have a whole thing to sort of talk about it for an hour.
But the point is that when I started was just that the you the more information you make available to yourself, the better your thinking through the implications will be. I don’t know if I cut you off Alena sorry. I wasn’t sure if I got excited and spoke over you.
Alena
I was just going to say if you make friends with people with different specialties as well. So, you know, for example, Laura and I have animal behavior backgrounds. So if somebody comes up and says, hey, I’m writing a story that has a dog in it, how would a dog react in this situation or is this believable? I am happy to nerd out about a thing I know about and say, well, let me tell you how a dog would react in this situation, because that’s something I am into.
Alena
You know, just the other night on our one of our writers chats, I had done a bunch of research for a story I wrote a few years ago that basically involved somebody who was physically, physically dead but still still internally living. You know, he was inhabiting his own dead body more or less. So I did a ton of research on things like rigor mortis, how to prevent decomposition of tissue, chemical things they do in meat processing to keep the body viable longer, like all the stuff.
Alena
So Laura had a question about like, how would you know, how would rigor mortis be different in a dragon than it would in a human? So she just hit me up on chat. She’s like, hey, I know you did this research. What do you think about this? And by finding people with interests or knowledge bases or specialties that are slightly different than your own, you have a really good resource to be able to bounce ideas or get input on whether or not something is believable, even if it’s not in a real world, setting their input could still be valuable because they know how systems work or how society makes use of a technology or something like that.
Laura
And find reenactors, like those people know what stuff feels like to wear all day and the best ways to compensate. Find people who — and they don’t have to fight dragons, but if they fight anything, then they can realize, oh, this weapon is shaped this way for a reason. OK, so if I’m fighting an aerial creature rather than a ground creature, that’s going to need to change and then that’s going to affect the armor and that’s going to affect all the things.
Laura
You know, again, I mean, over create, if you know more about it than what is going into your material, you know, it’s going to hold up because you didn’t think to the first degree and stop. You know, you went through the whole thing. So. But again, you can do anything you want if you have a reason for it, anything at all. Oh, I think we lost Alena. Well, we’ll see if we can get her back.
Laura
And in no way am I saying. Don’t you know, don’t do the fun thing. What I’m saying is just give me a reason for it, just make me believe that it’s real. And again, go back and use history. Anything you want to do, it’s already happened. If you were to be like, hey, we’re going to have a coup and overthrow the government. And so we’re going to plan this raid in the middle of the night to overthrow the the local governor. And and we’ve been working really hard on it. But then it rained that night and so everything failed because people didn’t want to go out in the rain. Hey, that happened. I’m not going to remember the date, that was in in Venice in like the 13 or 14 hundreds or something. I obviously didn’t plan that. And so I haven’t looked it up. But that’s, you know, stuff like that, you know, just to just go back and find like what is working or not working historically.
Laura
You know why? You know, electric cars, we think of electric cars as new. Electric cars are not new. We had electric cars as early as or before we had gasoline cars. Why did they not take off then and are more popular now? OK, well, it has to do with other technologies that were available to support the electric car or not support the electric car. So, you know, again, just get into, you know, get into history, find anything that’s nerdy.
Laura
Big plug Alena is not here. So I can I can do it because she is on the local historical society board. Find your local historical society or somebody’s local historical society, if you’re writing something in a different regional setting than your own and use that. Like you can do a lot, so.
Laura
All right. See, and I don’t know if we are not seeing Alena coming back yet, we are getting close to time. So I don’t know if the chat has been delayed for me at some points. And I know there’s also been some buffering, so I’m going to give some time to it for any questions or comments to get in from the chat. But yeah, the really the short version is just think through things.
Laura
So I’m going to do a couple of plugs while we’re here. Next week, we’re going to do a walk through and a demo of the Atticus software, that is the writing and publishing software that’s it’s not officially launched yet, but I have a beta copy and I will be sharing that with you. And I’ve also been chatting with the support team a little bit. So I will share what I have learned with you and show you how that works and what you can do with that. So you can make a decision, if that’s a good option for you or if you want to continue using something else.
Laura
And then at the end of the month, I will be speaking at the Twitch Writers Network CONduit, which is a free online writers con that will be entirely on Twitch. And that is June twenty fifth and twenty seventh. You can check it out at Writers Conduit dot com, which I should probably just throw in a chat that would be useful and I don’t think their schedule is up yet, but you will be able to see the schedule at this website when it goes completely live. They’re still finalizing the schedule.
Laura
And then that same weekend Alena is speaking at, I believe, Casa Con. And I was going to ask her to talk about that and share about that a little bit.
Laura
But she is not here right now. So I’m going to put what I believe is the URL in there. I think that’s it, so we’re going to see that, but she she will be talking on a panel about world building there, which is how I knew that she was also thinking about this topic when I was planning my talk on it, but then also some other things. And then I will be speaking on several topics, things like author websites and oh, my gosh, I’ve got three different conferences that are coming up and I’m blending, which I’m blending, which talks I’m doing when. Which one? So I don’t know.
Laura
I think I’ve got two or three at at Writers CONduit. And then I’ll also be doing some mentoring appointments and things like that. So just check those out. Whatever the schedule says is more accurate than whatever I’m telling you right now because I’m honestly misremembering between several different conferences at this moment. So.
Laura
Yeah, so that is it. Thanks for coming by. I’m really sorry about the buffering. As Alena said, we suspect it’s something local. I can just kick and scream a lot, but this is what it is and hopefully it’ll be better by this time next week. I don’t know. We’ll find out, but the replay should be clean, so I’ll make sure to get that up as soon as I can. So that is it. And I’m going to take us off at this point. Everybody have a fantastic week. Go build your worlds and and happy creating. Take care. Bye.
