Category Archives: worldbuilding

Guest Post by Helen Lowe on Worldbuilding + a joint giveaway

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I would like to welcome fantasy writer Helen Lowe. Her second novel, The Gathering of the Lost, is recently released by Orbit Books, and I’m pleased to be able to highlight Helen, her books, and her thoughts on world building.

Below the guest post you will find a joint giveaway. You need only comment to enter.

 

Building Fantastic Worlds—“It’s A Mystery”

By Helen Lowe

 

Over the past few weeks, at various stops on The Gathering of the Lost blog tour, I have discussed a number of facets of the story, including environment, war, romance, history, adventure and writing strong women characters. Yet all these aspects could equally well apply to any writing genre, from contemporary realism to crime to historical fiction. The element that really distinguishes FSF, especially when a story departs from this-world-as-we-know-it, is world building.

But how do compelling and intriguing worlds come about—the ones where arguably the world is as much a character as any of the personalities that appear within the story. Logic suggests there ought to be a formula, one any aspiring world builder can follow so that adding two and two will result in—hey presto—a fantastic world. Right?

Rather than an enthusiastic and positive “yes,” my initial response is more cautious. There are certainly ingredients that distinguish the worlds that have really seized my imagination. For example, an extreme physical environment dominates Ursula Le Guin’s Winter in “The Left Hand of Darkness,” as it does Frank Herbert’s Arrakis (“Dune”) and Robin Hobb’s Rain Wilds (The Live Ships series and now the Rain Wilds Chronicles.) But before we can go “extreme physical environment: check,” we have to consider worlds like Tolkien’s Middle Earth. The landscapes are reasonably diverse, but not extreme, yet Middle Earth has retained its place in our collective imagination for nearly sixty years.

When thinking about what makes the world stand out, I find myself coming back to Tolkien’s layering of myth and history in Middle Earth, which results in a sense of continuity beyond the present adventure. I also return to the strong association of “culture” with each new landscape: hobbits and the Shire; the differing elven cultures of Rivendell, Lothlorien, and Mirkwood; the dwarves of Moria and ents of Fangorn, the human societies of Rohan and those of Gondor. At one level many of these groups comprise separate species, but they are also distinct cultures; the way they both shape their world, and are shaped by it, reflects those distinctions.

Culture plays a vital role in defining Le Guin’s Winter and Hobb’s Rain Wilds, too, as does the historical and legendary continuum on Dune. So—a distinctive or extreme physical setting with a layering of myth and history, and/or culture. Perhaps some building blocks for creating fantastic worlds are emerging here.

But although the latter elements also form part of Catherynne M Valente’s Palimpsest, and to a lesser extent China Mieville’s Un Lun Dun, they pale beside the sheer imaginative creativity of both worlds: the piling of the bizarre onto the weird or downright whacky. Another building block, right—only now the author has to juggle physical extremes with those of the fantastical and it would be very easy to drop any or all of the balls. Easier still if one begins to consider Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland and Looking Glass worlds, which are based around playing cards and chess, or Paolo Bacigalupi’s Thailand where it is the vision of technological and bio-engineered genetic change that defines the world and compels the reader’s attention.

So how do the disparate elements that may—but don’t necessarily all, or always—comprise FSF world building get pulled together to create the worlds that absorb our attention and colonise our imaginations?

My short answer, culled from the film “Shakespeare In Love”, is: “It’s a mystery.” Because the actual answer seems nebulous and probably unsatisfactory—that the essential ingredient is a spark that leaps from the writer’s imagination, to the writing on the page or screen, and from there to the reader. In fact there is no formula able to guarantee that the necessary spark can and will be struck.

In terms of the “how to” employed by different authors, I suspect there are as many approaches as there are writers. Some will plan and design extensively in advance, while others allow the world, like the characters, to evolve as they write. My own world building is a mix of the instantaneous, the unexpected vision of a world or character that leaps into being, followed by the evolutionary—where the world unfolds, a little like a map unrolling, as the characters encounter it.

In terms of The Wall of Night world the first concept began long ago with a vision of a twilit, wind blasted environment garrisoned by keeps illuminated with inner light. Yet as to what lay inside the vast strongholds like the abandoned Old Keep of Winds—that knowledge only came when the storytelling began and the first characters actually went there. The world building evolved through their experiences: what each character saw, heard, smelt, touched—and was also touched by—and tasted, as well as her or his curiosity or need to learn what they did not already know.

Yet surely—you may argue—the world already exists outside the characters’ experience of it, in the author’s mind for example. And to an extent it does, in my case because of that first vision of the Wall of Night. Conversely though, the southern realms of Haarth, which come to the fore in “The Gathering Of The Lost” (The Wall of Night Book Two), and the romance of the road that stretches “from Ij to Ishnapur” evolved through the unfolding story, not via prior planning. Ursula Le Guin, in “Steering the Craft,” talks of the creative process in terms of ‘pulling ideas out of the air’—so perhaps the world of Haarth was there in the ether all along, waiting to be discovered. But after that initial flash of discovery, I had to begin the process of writing in order to explore its realms, cultures and frontiers.

I am forced to conclude that world building does contain an element of mystery. I can check all the boxes—yet still that vital spark may not be there. It occurs to me though, that I do not look on any aspect of storytelling as box checking. So perhaps that is the vital spark: whether manifesting in an instant or evolving over time, the worlds that I pull from the air have colour, texture and depth. In the moment they appear they are real. And although by no means assured, that sense of reality is the key to ensuring a world is also real on the page—and may become real for the reader as well.

                                                       

Helen Lowe is a novelist, poet, and interviewer, and the current Ursula Bethell Writer-in-Residence at the University of Canterbury. She has won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for both Thornspell (Knopf) in 2009, and The Heir of Night (The Wall of Night Book One) in 2011. The Heir of Night has also recently been shortlisted for the Gemmell Morningstar Award. Helen posts every day on her Helen Lowe on Anything, Really blog, on the 1st of every month on the Supernatural Underground, and occasionally on SF Signal. You can also follow her on Twitter: @helenl0we. [In the Twitter handle, the 0 is a zero, not an ‘o’]

 

 

GIVEAWAY

Everyone who comments will be in the draw to win one of two book packages:

1) A copy of Helen Lowe’s The Heir of Night and a copy (your choice) of either my Spirit Gate (Crossroads 1) or Cold Magic (Spiritwalker 1)

2) A copy of Helen Lowe’s The Gathering of the Lost and a copy (your choice) of either my Shadow Gate (Crossroads 2) or Cold Fire (Spiritwalker 2)

The draw will close on May 1 at 12 midnight (Hawaii time) with the result posted here the next day. The draw to be made by Random Number Integer.

World-building: To start, I ask myself: Who is visible?

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I have written enough books now that I do feel I have some things I can say about world building in a science fiction and fantasy context (although some of my comments pertain to any form of fiction regardless of whether it is set in a secondary world or this one). I wish to emphasize here that this is how I go about it. That’s all. These are my thoughts and my process, not a universal should, ought, or must.

My process has changed over the years as I’ve begun to think more about how I think about the worlds I’m building.

For me, the intersection between setting and character has always been the most important element of developing a story.

I love and adore maps, and I will probably write a post about maps another day (oh, wait, I already did), but most maps can only give us a limited picture of what is going on:

Mapmakers are always making choices about how a place is represented and what matters enough to put on the map.

These days the first thing I consider when I start are questions.

Who is going to be visible in the story? And why?

Which people does the culture or cultures the story will move through consider important enough to be visible? Who is invisible in this culture? And why? Whose voices do these cultures privilege, and whose do they ignore? And why?

That allows me to ask myself whose stories I want to tell. Who do I want to make visible? Who is visible to me? Who may be invisible to me and how can I set aside or uncover my own assumptions so I can create visibility for characters and lives and situations I might otherwise ignore?

Why does this matter?

Honestly, I can’t do justice to this topic, but I’ll make a few comments and probably follow them up later, and I hope those of you interested in this subject will chime in with your thoughts either in the comments here or with posts elsewhere. Those of you uninterested in this subject will, I hope, have stopped reading by now.

There are a lot of people “we” don’t see. I don’t mean “we” as a universal because too many factors like gender, age, race (an anthropologically problematic word but the only one I’ve got at the moment), ethnicity, language, community, sexuality, religion, country of birth and/or residence, and a whole host of other elements influence each individual. But to generalize, let me propose a scenario as an example.

Let’s say “I” have decided to write an epic fantasy trilogy. It will focus on a war, and have a lot of battles, plus court intrigues, and maybe some travel through dangerous landscapes. There will be bad guys and good guys, and the first thing “I” decide is that I don’t want it to just be a default good versus bad setting but to have ambivalent guys, too, people who do good things for bad reasons or do bad things while trying to achieve good outcomes and also people who have flaws that cause them to make bad choices or strengths that cause them to do good things even when the reader thinks they are only capable of bad. I am going to make “visible” the idea that people can be complex and have both strengths and weaknesses.

But who are these people and where are they living? What does the full tapestry of life look like in this place? If I do not think about this, it is easy to fall back on choices that aren’t choices as much as unexamined assumptions about whose lives are interesting enough to read about and what people are “allowed” to tell their own stories. By not considering the totality of life in a culture (regardless of whether I write about it), I am already creating visibility and invisibility in my own head if nowhere else.

As a writer who grew up in an Anglophone country in the northern temperate zone, I can easily “default” to a quasi-medival or early-modern English-history-like setting just because such settings pervade the literature that is already written here and the visual media I have been exposed to. There is nothing wrong with these settings. These are great settings for stories. But if I do not consciously think about why I want that setting instead of some other one, then I am defaulting to the most visible setting in my culture without truly specifically choosing it. I have, without thinking about it, already created a visible and an invisible.

For that matter, even if I do choose an Anglophone-like setting or whatever setting I choose, which part of that setting am I going to highlight and follow? What part of daily life am I going to see? What might I be ignoring? What lies behind the door I never opened because I didn’t think it was important, or because I was told it didn’t matter and never thought to question what I was told?

As a writer (and a person), I have to keep stopping myself from plowing on with my unexamined assumptions. I have to keep asking questions.

The questions pertain to characters, too, perhaps more to them than to any other part of the world building (because world building is not separate from character).

Whose stories are worth telling? Whose stories need telling? Whose voices do I hear? Am I ignoring voices because I believe what I’ve been told, that they don’t belong in this story? Am I ignoring characters because I don’t see them? Because I think they don’t matter or that no one will want to hear about them?

How can my world have weight and life if it is built on a edifice of silence?

Am I seeing the lives of the people who live in this world in their fullness, as they would see themselves? Or am I only seeing them from the outside, assigning my own definitions to them?

What about the characters I decide to write about? How will their lives illuminate the world they live in? Is this all I want or are there other places I might want to go?

What might I not be seeing?

To build a world, I start with questions. I want to build not on top of my limits, but on top of the possibilities.

Cold Fire Word Cloud & NaNoWriMo Day 1 (2011)

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For the first day of NaNoWriMo I offer up the Cold Fire Word Cloud. Click through to see the Cold Fire Wordle

Today included some discussion of the problem of too much research and/or worldbuilding bogging down stories. It’s received wisdom, and I think reasonably true, that YA calls for less world building on the page. My one concern about that is that by stripping out too much world building in an sffh YA setting, one unintended result is that the setting smooths more and more into a default generic American or Euro/Am.

Wordage:

1250 on Cold Steel (for the first day after a week off as I get back into the flow, that’s decent; I’m aiming for 2K/day).

850 on my new secondary project, which I’m doing in part to write something I have no expectations of, so I can get more relaxed into writing for the pure pleasure of working on a story for the delight of the process. This does NOT mean I don’t enjoy writing Cold Steel. It’s just that writing the first draft of Cold Steel has a lot more built in pressure because of expectations raised by the first two books.

A Real Unreal Place: Sherwood Smith’s CORONETS AND STEEL and BLOOD SPIRITS

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I love to read, and I particularly love to read novels that transport me to a place I normally could not go. This is one reason I read very little mainstream contemporary fiction or, indeed, much fiction at all set in the present day where I live. If I do read present-day-era fiction, it often contains what I’ll call a “genre” element, that is, something that sets it one or two or ten steps apart from “ordinary life” or, at least, the life I live in the USA.

Because another element I really love in novels is landscape: I enjoy visiting places I have never been or may never be able to go.

Sherwood Smith is one of my favorite world builders. Her Inda quadology is set in a secondary fantasy world (one not connected to this world) so fully imagined that I almost feel I have walked there. And that’s besides the well drawn characters and the complex, gripping plots.

In her Ruritanian fantasies CORONETS AND STEEL and BLOOD SPIRITS, Smith brings this same ability to fully create a thoroughly real unreal place in our world.

I’m not going to write up a plot synopsis; you can get that elsewhere, I don’t want to introduce spoilers, but mostly I’m no good at and dislike writing up plot synopses whether of my own work or someone else’s. It’s a skill I don’t really have. Suffice to say that the main character and narrator, Kim, is a California girl who travels to a small, isolated Eastern/Central European principality. This principality does not actually exist (thus the Ruritanian aspect of the story) but after traveling to Dobrenica in Smith’s capable hands, one is sure it could.

Dobrenica feels so real that I believe I could buy a train ticket to go there or perhaps that I already had. In both summer and winter–although especially in winter–the city, landscape, cultural traditions, and history are so strikingly well defined that the country seems to be of a piece with European history while being entirely its own unique place. I breathed the winter air; the fountains and curious old local customs are both equally visible in my mind’s eye. The salon where Kim fences with people who may be her adversaries or may be her allies has as much heft and texture as if I had walked there myself.

And that is all besides the lovely story of lost princesses, secret history, vampires, political machinations, a thematic disquisition on the power and weight of duty and honor, and of course swordplay. Highly recommended.

Watching ATLA: S1 E1-2

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Avatar: The Last Airbender Season1 Episodes 1-2
I watched the first four episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender (ATLA) last year because my son’s girlfriend owns the first season and they urged me to watch it. We watched those first 4 episodes together, and then the watching with them lapsed and so I stopped watching even though I had enjoyed what I had seen so far. I am one who prefers to watch tv shows with other people so we can make comments as we watch and share observations.

I need to mention a few things:

1) I have three children, now all college age. ATLA’s three seasons ran from 2005 – 2008, which coincided with the end of their high school years, so these did not come up on my radar at that time, although I expect that was in large part because we don’t have cable so would have had to wait for it to come out on DVD regardless. By the time they were all in middle school I was in any case really burned out on children’s tv and films; it has taken me some years to even be open to viewing any again, as I came to pretty much loathe almost all of it. For years I had to take my kids to see films that bored me to tears or which I all too often really disliked for their male-centered reductionist vanilla-USA view of the world.

2) I will be riffing on the show as I watch it. I invite discussion. My criticisms do not constitute condemnation, just as the great things I enthuse about may not necessarily mean I think it perfect (forex, I liked both Firefly and Buffy a great deal, but I have criticisms of both shows). I do not expect to follow a consistent pattern in what I talk about. I will raise points that interest me in the moment. Those interested in discussing the show, please respond however you wish; don’t feel constrained by the points I raise. If you have other points you want to raise, then do so. Just, please, NO SPOILERS. Those of you who are superior to me in being able to tolerate spoilers, just please humor me in this. Spoil the eps I’m discussing and all those previous as much as you wish, just not future eps. Thanks.

3) I pretty much consider The Wire my favorite show ever shown on television (that I’ve seen, obviously). I’m approaching ATLA as an adult viewer with adult expectations and adult tastes, but with an understanding that the show is written for a children’s audience. I don’t expect to find in ATLA certain of the things I most loved about The Wire, but at the same time I do have expectations, from everything I’d been told and read, that this is a superior piece of storytelling that stands on its own and does not need the caveat “good for a kids’ show.” That is, I expect I will be watching a good story, period. Given that there are three seasons to play with, I would not be surprised to see some pretty sophisticated narrative unfold. We’ll see.

4) I plan to try to post every Wednesday night my time, which means Thursday in the rest of the world. I hope to review and discuss two episodes per week, if I can manage it. After the end of Season 1, I may take a short break before beginning Season 2, and the same for Season 3.

5) I wish I had done this when I watched Season 1 of Legends of the Galactic Empire with my son, Twin A. Oh well.

I will not at first talk much about the setting and the plethora of Asian, African, and Arctic-inspired people and places. ATLA is well known for its depiction of a world that is truly diverse, and I’m just going to take that as a given for the moment. I may comment on it as the mood takes me, but let me just note straight out here that, especially considering the recent sad regression toward bland Hollywood white male normativity, ATLA stands as a beacon. (The film was obviously an aberration that missed the point of the show entirely on many levels, so I’ll not mention it again.) Given ATLA’s commercial success, I can only hope that it will stand as a harbinger of things to come, a promise of steady change and expansion in the diversity of what is on offer to our increasingly diverse country as well as the countries to which programs made in the USA are exported. To get political for a moment, the weird and troubling retreat toward homogeneity pushed both by Hollywood and by some sections of the American population and political establishment is not just swimming against the tide of demographics, history, and social change but is actively deleterious to the health of our culture. So, in that sense, ATLA strikes me as an important piece in our ongoing cultural evolution.

Episodes 1 and 2 function as a set, a two part introduction to the world, the characters, and the story. This go round I watched with my daughter. Her comments will be prefaced with Rhi.

The opening is narrated by practical, level-headed Katara, a girl (I’m assuming she is about 13) of the water bending tribe who lives in or around the south pole of this planet; she’s ambitious, though–she wants to be taught how to waterbend, and no waterbenders remain in her tribe to teach her. She has an older brother, Sokka, who is 14 or 15 and often annoying and impulsive but also brave and loyal. Their mother is dead, killed in a Fire Nation raid, and their father and all the adult men in the village have gone overseas to someplace in the Earth Kingdom to fight against the invaders.

The story opens with brother and sister out fishing among the ice floes. The degree to which Sokka as a teen boy can be annoying (and making himself the center of attention) is constantly undercut and/or emphasized with humor. In fact, I’ll come back to that point later, because humor is consistently used to leaven and heighten the way the narrative unfolds.

The basic premise: There are four elements, water, earth, fire, and air. “Benders” can manipulate those elements. The “avatar” can manipulate all four. In the last 100 years the Fire Nation has advanced a program of steady conquest, including wiping out (as far as anyone knows) all the people of the Air Nation. The last avatar was said to be an airbender.

Katara and Sokka finds a 12 year old boy encased in an iceberg. As Rhi said, “Best release of a legendary hero ever: through sibling arguing!”

Over the course of eps 1 and 2 it is revealed that our boy Aang is the last airbender, the avatar who is the last hope for humanity to halt the conquest of the Fire Nation. We’re also introduced to Prince Zuko of the Fire Nation, his Uncle Iroh, and Zuko’s quest to prove himself by finding and capturing the avatar.

I could do more of a plot synopsis, but I’m not interested in discussing that for this first entry. I want to talk about the exceptional job the writers have done with introducing the world smoothly, quickly, and clearly.

I do big ticket world-building, so I know what I’m talking about. This is really well done. It’s a simple set up that leaves a huge amount of room for later complexity.

The writers introduce exactly as much as you need to know in each scene. Each scene is framed around either a humorous episode or a piece of action that will forward the story but which also reveals something of the basic situation in the world. The viewer never gets piled on with two much information. There’s a fair amount of “tell” but it’s short, to the point, and handled with absolute clarity of explanation. When the degree of information load starts hitting critical, the story breaks for something as seemingly trivially entertaining as penguin sledding. Which is then used to transition the narrative movement into another scene where more world and character building takes place. When the tone grows serious, humor breaks the mood (the little boy saying “I have to pee”), or helps to focus how the viewer is pulling in information.

These first two ATLA episodes are, to my mind, a textbook example of how to introduce a world, characters, and story. The basis for greater complexity is absolutely there but anything that isn’t necessary for the initial introduction is left for later.

The character building at this point is fairly basic without being shallow, but for this entry I don’t have much to say about that. Aang’s crush on Katara is sweet and, together with his youth, goofiness, and mistakes, helps to humanize a boy who is otherwise ridiculously too powerful; humor also is consistently used to undercut and make manageable Aang’s super power. Zuko is properly angsty, and of course I adore Uncle Iroh, a classic example of the man pretending to be a bit of a fool who obviously is a deep strategist. Although Aang is the avatar, Katara and Sokka are, to my mind, really the anchor that holds the story together, and they’re both necessary in ways that I may try to discuss later. Aang’s destiny is to a degree known, but Katara and Sokka have just started journeys whose outcome can’t yet be predicted.

And that, I think, is where I’ll end this quite long entry: After seeing the first two episodes of ATLA, I cannot in fact predict what the path is going to look like. And that’s pretty impressive.

 

Trying to Write Non-Colonial Alternate-History in a Fantasy Context

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The Spiritwalker Trilogy (starting with COLD MAGIC) is my attempt to write “an Afro-Celtic post-Roman icepunk Regency fantasy adventure with airships, Phoenician spies, and the intelligent descendents of troodons.”

There’s a quite interesting discussion of colonialism and post colonialism (specifically with regard to fantasy and science fiction and her own work) in N.K. Jemisin’s post Considering Colonialism. In the comments, Jemisin mentions that she thinks Spiritwalker might be a non-colonial narrative.

I suspect it is difficult if not impossible to write non-colonial narratives in our colonial and post-colonial world when writing from the perspective of a culture that has done its share of colonizing. However, I believe the point is to examine other ways the world could be (and is, outside a certain narrow range of vision) and open a window onto them.

Here is the map for COLD FIRE, Spiritwalker #2  (click to embiggen)

Map drawn by Jeffrey Ward from an original by me (assisted by A’ndrea Messer).