Month: May 2021

Build Only the World You Need

There are a lot of ways to build a world.  We tend to think of worldbuilding as something for science fiction or fantasy.  I don’t think of it that way.  Mysteries are often tied to a particular place, like Tony Hillerman’s Navajo Tribal Police mysteries[1] or the Bridgerton series by Julia Quinn, set in the world of English aristocracy of the 18th century. 

Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series is a lovely example of creating a very specific world in a very specific time, the waning days of Dublin’s economic boom and bust—and as good worlds do, it grounds her series in an authenticity that convinces the reader that this world is real and makes the stakes of the story feel real.

Science Fiction and Fantasy

There is a lot of advice on the web for worldbuilding.  Hugo Award winner N.K. Jemisin has a masterclass on worldbuilding and (https://www.masterclass.com/classes/n-k-jemisin-teaches-fantasy-and-science-fiction-writing/chapters/elements-of-worldbuilding ) Brandon Sanderson has a technique for building magic systems that you can find in his lecture series on YoutTube.

I will state up front, I don’t like Rendezvous With Rama.  I tried it several times and just not my thing.  It’s a book that has really meant a lot to a lot of people, so I assume that it’s like licorice, which my husband loves and which I hate.  It’s not a case that Rendezvous With Rama is not good writing, it’s a matter of preference. 

Thinking about worldbuilding in the way mystery and romance writers think about it can be a different and sometimes useful way to worldbuild.  I’ve created four prompts that can help bootstrap both setting and worldbuilding.  Also, they give me an excuse to research and I love research.  So much easier than writing.

[1] Linda Rodriguez, indigenous American writer, discusses Tony Hillerman and issues of appropriation in a post http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com/2012/04/literary-mystery-noveliststony.html She feels that Hillerman was respectful but points out that not all indigenous writers and readers agree.

What is a world?

When you build a world, you should think about language, customs, and culture.  Think of a story set in a horse racing track. 

The horse racing track has its own language—in English, there are words we use at a track that we don’t use much of any place else.  Horse races are described in miles but also furlongs.  There are stakes and claim races, win, place, and show. 

There are different kinds of people at a race track.  There are the people who come to watch the races; some of them sit in the stands.  Rich people and companies have boxes where food and alcohol are served.  Serious gamblers may stand at the edge of the track instead of being in the stands.  Then there are the horse people—trainers, grooms, exercise boys, veterinarians.  And there’s another group that works at the track—they take the money, work in the office, or serve food.

There are customs—the ‘call to the post’ where a trumpet fanfare is played, the winner’s circles.  For the Kentucky Derby, women wear fancy hats and people drink mint juleps.  The winning horse gets a blanket of roses (which the horse probably either ignores or wants to eat.)

There are uniforms—the ‘silks’ that the jockeys wear. 

It’s a complex world and if your story is, say, a mystery involving a horse racing track, knowing this is the world of your story.

What is the goal of worldbuilding?

Your world is not interesting in and of itself.  Your world is interesting because it

  • Creates an emotion
  • Supports the story or interaction

Some people want to build a consistent world from the very beginning.  I’ve always thought of Tolkien as this kind of writer, but Tolkien turns out to have been more of a pantser than I ever realized.  There’s a letter to his son (http://hedgepickle.blogspot.com/2013/02/trotter-description-of-development-of.html) where he describes writing a scene where there’s a character sitting in the corner in an inn who he calls Trotter.  Tolkien had no idea who the character was—eventually it would turn out to be Aragorn, who you would think was pretty essential to both world and plot.

I build my worlds the way theatre sets are built—that is, you can see a door at the edge of the set and the yellow flowered wallpaper that suggests a hallway, but if you go backstage, there’s no hallway.  I want everything the reader sees to feel lived in, as if it has history.  But I want to evolve my worldbuilding, as Tolkien did, to fit my story, so I don’t try to plan everything out at once.

When I’m thinking about worldbuilding, I’m rarely thinking about geography or even buildings.  I don’t really world build systematically.  I like things to feel messy because my everyday life is messy.  When I first saw Star Wars, I had never seen a science fiction movie where things were dirty, and it just made everything more real. 

When I’m teaching worldbuilding, I suggest that the writers think about:

  • Language
  • Classes
  • Culture
  • Dress and architecture (Styles)

By language I mean jargon or language.  (Junot Diaz has very interesting things to say about using English and Spanish in his works. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/12/08/nyregion/outsider-with-a-voice.html )  But everybody uses jargon.  If your world is a university, there is tons of language; GPA, required courses or GDEs, Fraternity, Sorority, tenure.  At my university, D Clearance is a big issue (it’s a hoop some students have to jump through to get into certain classes.)

There are social classes in university, too.  Students sort into lower classmen, upper classmen, graduate students, PhD candidates, scholarship kids, frat and sorority kids.  People have opinions about Business Majors versus Theater Majors.  Then there are professors; tenured, part time, TA’s.  There are administrators who work in admissions, or residence life (more jargon there) and the working-class folk (in the US, often BIPOC in a mostly white landscape) who keep the place running; landscapers, cashiers, housekeeping.  Each of them experiences the university in a different way.

There are a lot of weird cultural rituals; ‘rushing’ for fraternities and sororities, homecoming, commencement, school colors.

Dress and architecture come in, too.  A lot of universities in the US strive to echo the architecture of Oxford or Cambridge—brick or stone buildings, ivy, walks through grassy lawns. 

When you are thinking of where your story is set, if you have trouble with setting, maybe jot down a few notes about these four categories and see if they help you build out your world.

Writing Exercise: 

  • Make a list of half a dozen ‘worlds’—like the race track, or Junot Diaz’s Dominican-American working class New York high school kids, or of the world of the high school marching band.  Think of places you either know, or are interested in. 
  • Create two characters who are in that world and want different things.  If your world is, say, the homicide division of a police department, maybe both your characters are detectives, or maybe one is a detective and one is a witness.
  • Write a scene—1,000 to 2,000 wds—set in your world.

What is Genre Fiction?

It’s sometimes useful, when you’re starting to write and define yourself as a writer, to think of broad categories of fiction, because it can help you understand what the reader expectations are (and decide whether you want to deliver them or subvert them!) If this kind of thinking is not useful for you, I absolutely do not believe you have to think about it at all — write what you want to write, and let the market and your agent figure out where and how to sell it!

But for me, as part of the study of fiction, it’s been instructive to look at the differences and similarities between different categories or markets. One of broadest is genre fiction and literary fiction.

I think the easiest and incidentally the most useful way to think about genre fiction is, it is writing that intentionally serves the expectations of a certain genre. Those expectations can be plot-centric, as in murder mysteries where we expect that the murderer will be revealed by the end, or emotional, as in a thriller when we expect to be thrilled, or both, as in a romance, where we expect the emotional fulfillment of a happily-ever-after ending that also ties up the love plot.

While literary fiction can have any or all of these elements, it also tends to be harder to categorize in a particular genre; it is also, quite often, more invested in exploring theme or as aspect of narrative technique rather than focusing on plot or emotional impact.

The main thing to remember about such categories is they are not prescriptive; at least, I don’t think it’s fruitful to treat them in any way as prescriptive. There’s no real formula for “mystery” other than the genre expectations, and even that can be broken by a skilled and confident writer, to good effect (that one mystery story where the narrator turns out to be the murderer, for example!) Instead, I use categories to help me think about my story after I’ve written a draft. It can help me focus on what I realize is most important, or it can help me understand a potential reader for the story, and what they’d expect. For me, the most helpful way to frame genre questions has been to ask myself, what other books or texts is my story in conversation with?

What’s interesting to study is when novels work in both categories. Erin Morgenstern’s novel The Night Circus is a genre fantasy romance novel about young star-crossed magicians. It is also a literary novel of surrealism exploring the power of dreams and imagination, with themes of family legacy and professional rivalry that threaten to destroy innocent lives.

Another example is the short stories of Kelly Link, who is a spectacularly gifted and literary writer whose dazzling style is as much a hallmark of her work as is her uniquely fabulist, surreal imagination. See also Carmen Maria Machado, a fantastic writer who’s published in both literary magazines like Granta as well as genre publications like Nightmare. She’s also written a memoir, In the Dream House. So don’t ever feel like this genre exploration needs to lock you in to one field or another!

One way to start understanding your own work is to read what other people write. Read a lot, read across different genres. I learned so much about emotional scene-building from reading romances, for example, and so much about plotting from reading mysteries. I learned a lot about subtlety and letting small details do the heavy lifting from reading literary fiction.

And I learned that ultimately there’s really very little difference between these categories, at least in terms of the broad outlines. I found that very comforting — it freed me up to write what I wanted and trust that there will be readers out there for it, regardless of what genre my story ends up in!

Playing with a Story Idea

By the way, we have a new project coming soon! A podcast! Maureen and I are recording it now and will be releasing it later this spring. We’re so excited! We’ll be announcing it here on the blog and on our newsletter, so sign up at the link at the bottom of this page if you haven’t, so you can stay in touch.

The Story Kitchen Podcast

Before I was a writer, I worked in the video game industry (and in fact Maureen and I met teaching in a games program at a university!)

One of the things I learned from working in games is an attitude of playfulness towards my creative work. To me, this is related to the ideas of rapid prototyping and the “fail fast” mantra. It kind of forces you to not take your work too seriously.

How I apply that to writing is, as Maureen wrote last week, just try it! But for me, I don’t necessarily need to *write it* to try it. I do a lot of, I guess you could say, daydreaming. I think about the story, I ask myself questions about it (usually questions like, what if this happens? Who’s the protagonist? Why do I like this idea?) I’ll watch or read media that reminds me of the idea I have, either in tone or theme or plot points. And sometimes I just take a walk and talk about the idea out loud to myself.

At some point, of course, I go to the page and write. At this stage I try not to let my editor inside my writing room. (You know, the one who says things like, “This is a stupid idea. What is this even about? This makes no sense.” No time for that, keep her out of the room!)

I write down whatever little bits I have. I really like timed writing for this — I set a timer for five minutes, or ten minutes, and just write while thinking about the idea. At the end of that time, if I feel like it, I keep going. If not, I save the file (or the notebook — I’m a big fan of writing out ideas at this early stage in longhand) and save it for later.

I’m a big advocate of writing down random bits of ideas, by the way! You never know when that random bit will spark off another random bit! Keep a notebook around so you can scribble these stray thoughts and observations.

Sometimes an idea is so interesting and so exciting to me that it kind of takes over for a while. When that happens, I try to chase it. If it’s a short story, I try to get a draft down in one sitting. Or at least, get to an idea of what the ending is. (Endings are the hardest part for me.) If the idea starts looking like a novel-sized idea, I do what Maureen does, I just start writing for a while, and then I look back at what I’m writing, and start asking myself questions about it:

  • Who’s the protagonist, what does she want? What’s the worst thing that could happen to her?
  • What’s the theme of this? (It’s totally okay if you don’t know that — themes often emerge much later.)
  • Why am I interested in this story? What about it is exciting? What kinds of scenes would I be excited to write?
  • What are some exciting things that could happen in this story?
  • How could this story end?

Give yourself permission to play in the story world for while! Play with your characters, get to know them. Play with the setting, start getting a feeling for its mood, its tone, its geography. Keep writing as you go. Chase those stray moments of glee, indulge your curiosity.

And have fun!

P.S. Do you want to try playing with a story idea in a guided way? I’m running a short story clinic in June, Story from Beginning to End, in which we’ll write a story in one weekend! Check out link for more details.

I Have an Idea, How Do I Start?

A lot of the things on this blog are geared towards people who have been writing long enough to have questions about technique.  That said, I often teach people who are not writers.  I’ve taught everything from MFA workshops to intro classes.  I teach a class in developing stories for interactive forms like video games and Augmented Reality and the class ranges from people who have a degree in writing to people who have computer science degrees and no interest in writing.  I try to make writing lessons that are flexible enough to teach something no matter what your skill level is.

This question is a hard one for me and yet I see it a lot.  How you start is such a hard question to answer because I don’t really know where you are starting from.

Do you outline your idea or just write?

Even if I did know where you were starting from, how anyone starts is different from person to person and from style of writing to style of writing.  For example, if I’m doing a project for hire, I do a high level outline, then a comprehensive outline.  Then I write the project, often changing the outline and consulting with whoever hired me.

When I write a short story, I just write it.  I don’t outline at all.  Most people I know don’t outline a short story, but there are people who do, and there are people who, say, jot down a phrase for the beginning, a phrase for what they want to do in the middle, a phrase for the ending.  I would recommend writing a short story without an outline, but outlining is not wrong if it works for you.

When I’m writing a novel, I write ten or twenty pages and then I do a high level outline.  My last novel I used the writing software Scrivener, and listed my outline points as chapters, then fixed that as I wrote.  But my first published novel wasn’t even supposed to be a novel, it was supposed to be a short story.  It has an overarching character arc, and all that jazz, but it wasn’t planned ahead of time.  The structure of the novel grew organically from finding that I wanted to write more.  The structure grew organically from my desire to figure out what happened.  My other writing decision was I didn’t want to do what I thought of as ‘connective pieces’—the boring parts of the novel.  So, I skipped everything I thought was just ‘getting to the next part’ and wrote the next part I wanted to see.  

If you’re asking ‘How Do I Start’ you may not even be at the point to join the argument over which is better, plotting ahead of time or letting the novel take you where it will.  You may not even know if you’re writing a novel or a short story.  

At a certain point, I’d say just start writing.  The way to learn to write is to write.  Chances are your first piece won’t be great for pretty much the same reasons that your first game of tennis, or basketball, or baseball, wasn’t professional level.  Let’s face it, the reason I write stuff is because I want to read certain stories and since they don’t exist, I have to write them.  Even if your story isn’t a great read, you’ll have written it and chances are very good you’ll feel the story more vividly as you write it than anything you’ve ever read that someone else wrote.  

What about characters?

I am a character driven writer, so I would say, as I almost always do, start with character.  Very few books or stories are about a single person who never interacts with another person although some very good stories are, in fact, just about one person, it’s not like you can’t do that, but stories are, at their heart, about things going wrong and whether or not they get fixed or dealt with.  It’s easier to have things go wrong when there are two people because two people are always going to have different things they want and need.  If you’ve ever tried to decide where to go to lunch with someone, you’ve probably done the dance of ‘I don’t want to just say a place because what if they don’t like Chinese food, but they think I want to go there?’ Two people are going to have conflicts whether that’s ‘I don’t really like that kind of food’ or ‘I want the other person to like me so I’m afraid to say the wrong thing.’  (That’s an internal conflict, that last one, but it counts.)

Put a couple of characters into a situation from your idea. You might say, I don’t know yet!  It’s just an idea.  Yeah, having an idea is the easy part. A lot of writers have way more ideas than they will ever be able to write.  I probably have at least one idea (often a bad one) a day that I think, ‘wouldn’t it be interesting to write that.’  I also think, ‘I should exercise more’. I think a lot of things.  But if you want to write, then I say, write.

You can write for yourself. You can write for an audience. You can write for both.  Writing for an audience isn’t better than writing for yourself.  Writing can be cathartic and can be consoling.  It can be personally engaging.  The nice thing is, as hobbies go, it’s cheap.  It’s not like boating, or owning a horse, or even collecting something.  So if you want to start something, I say, just try.

Next week, Jane will talk about how she works with her ideas.

Jane here with a quick message. We've been working on getting a podcast together! Our dream is that this podcast be interactive, kind of like a radio show but not exactly. That means we'd love to hear from you all: send us any questions you'd like us to address in the podcast by filling out this form. We can give you a shoutout or you can remain anonymous. Thanks so much! -J