Fringe Fiction Unlimited discussion

Not sure how many other authors are heavy on the world-building. I know meticulous mythos and metaphysics are more found in fantasy and scifi BUT figured I'd see what people's thoughts were.

I read a lot of fantasy YA and a common complaint in reviews is "not enough world-building". I'm also aware not everyone has the patience/memory for elaborate settings.

Maybe there's no helping the latter - you'll lose who you lose - but what level of detail do you think is necessary/appreciated to make an otherworldly setting seem real?

I just read the first chapter of an old Hungarian novel written in the early 20th century--the first novel in the Transylvania Trilogy. All I know about Transylvania I got from Dracula, so even though this book is far from YA fantasy, this author has a lot of world building to do for me. The entire first--long--chapter is the main character driving along a road in his old hometown (he has been away for years) on his way to a ball. He has had to rent a horse and buggy, so it's a pretty crappy horse and buggy, so it is a lot like he's crawling along in the slow lane of the 118 in a 67 Beetle, and all the traffic is whizzing past him. But, of course, these are all people he knew growing up, so as they go by, we get flashbacks and gossip and tragedies and portents and glimpses of village life and national politics, and all the time we know that WWI is on the horizon with all the slicing and dicing of Austria-Hungary that came with that. By the end of the chapter, the character's world has been roughly sketched out, and all the character has actually done the whole time is sit in the slow lane and wave.

I'm a patient reader so I enjoyed that. I like descriptions of people and landscapes and all that. I also recently read Huck Finn, and there is quite a lot of world building in that one--though the delivery is much livelier. If place is important in a story, some world building comes with it because any place we are not is a different world.

As an editor, I can tell you world building is laborious, especially if you are making it up as you go. Imagining a strange and interesting place to fit your action is one thing, but making it all fit together in the end is hard. How much world building one does also depends on the audience you're writing for. For some readers, it may be enough that the light in the cave changes from green to periwinkle as the characters fall to lovemaking, but some readers are going to get hung up on why the light changes. You may have to explain that in your world there is no sun and the light is always mood driven. For other readers you are going to have to explain how that works--the history and physics and even the metaphysics. No matter which way you go, you are bound to lose some readers. But the important thing is to supply what the characters need and to be consistent.

So, if there is a passionate light-altering love scene for which the author invents the mood-driven theory of light, there cannot be a scene elsewhere in the story where a character gets sunburned. The role of light will have to be carefully played, because on the one hand, light is everywhere and constant references to it will get extremely tedious, but it can't be altogether ignored either. If, for example, half a dozen characters are meeting, and one of them is privately growing tense and thinking there's some treachery at work, while another eagerly anticipates the planned ambush, won't the light just give the whole show away? A big part of world building happens in reconciling the needs of the story with the fantasy elements that have been established. Mood control suddenly becomes important, and there must be ways--spiritual, mental, mechanical, chemical?--for the evolved inhabitants to deal with the effects of light. Now, a skillful light manipulator has enormous power, and a talented mood detector becomes dangerous to the powers that be.

A very elaborate setting can be incomplete, and a complete setting can be simple. Readers who like elaborate settings will be drawn to that kind of book--and will most likely poke holes in it wherever they find a loose thread. But even elaborately built worlds don't benefit from a lot of irrelevant detail. So, if the characters look out on a desolate plain over which the amber light hovers, dissolving into darkness toward the distant Sulky Mountains, we don't need three paragraphs on the peoples who live on the other side of the mountain and how they bottle pink light and sell it at an exorbitant price to yet another irrelevant bunch of folks across the desert that never actually comes into the story.

On the other hand, it's hard to imagine a large-scale fantasy that doesn't depend on authorial geoengineering. A rule of thumb would be to match the "size" of the world to the story.

Longhare wrote: "we don't need three paragraphs on the peoples who live on the other side of the mountain and how they bottle pink light and sell it at an exorbitant price to yet another irrelevant bunch of folks across the desert that never actually comes into the story.
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Nice. Well put. I do a lot of world building and that's great advice. The other thing I ask myself - does the reader need to know this right now? Even if it's relevant, can it wait?

My editor tends toward - can you say it in half as many sentences?

I feel like a lot of worldbuilding is in the little details you add and not so much the huge swaths of description. I don't feel like I had a whole lot of detail about my world at large but I had several comments about the bigger world beyond the primary setting sounding interesting and big. You definitely have to find a balance. Especially in Fantasy where you have Tolkien and Martin and these huge, ultra-detailed worlds. As Longhare said, be consistent and match the "size."

I'm someone who doesn't mind getting lost on the scenic route - which is why I find GRRM a picturesque and engrossing writer. But - I do agree - sometimes it's the small touches and tie ins that give a premise far more plausibility and presence than a huge rundown of details

I like it to a point. I definitely don't want to hear about the entire history of a sword in the middle of the story (extra content about that stuff is cool). I'm definitely down for descriptions of the land. I tried to do that and will be trying again once I get through the first draft of this new book. I still need to chew on some of the scenery to figure out what I want out of it. Which is another big point: know what you want out of your "sets." We very much have an aspect of set design going.

The other part of worldbuilding, again, as far as SFF goes, and in what I've been doing, is that you might build a LOT of stuff that doesn't go into the story. And some stuff you wanted but couldn't find a place to fit.

And honestly, I think a lot of this is also "learn as you go" too. Which is where you can get inconsistencies later in a series. But that's just fine to me. As long as it's not character or plot-breaking, a few bits and bobs don't really hurt a story in my eyes.

Courtney wrote: "...sometimes it's the small touches and tie ins that give a premise far more plausibility and presence than a huge rundown of details..."

Yes, for example, Tolkien provides massive amounts of description of Lorien--trees and flets and singing creeks. But the most poignant image in the whole place is the dandeliion (yes, I know it's not really a dandelion, but it's a near equivalent, so we know this tiny flower already in ways that matter) that Aragorn is holding when Frodo catches him sitting in the grass lost in reverie. Though it is left unsaid, the flower holds a certain recognizable Lorien-associated meaning for Aragorn. Much later, Sam names his daughter after the flower, because it embodies for him what he finds good and lovely in the world--not its grandeur but its dandelions. It's a neat tie-in using a tiny but compelling detail.

I'm all for epic world building but not so much excess detail that don't impact the story in some way (narrows eyes at Robert Jordan). Depending on how far removed my stories are from plain old not affected by whacky metaphysics earth, I give as much details needed to set up the setting.. so far no complaints...

Definitely - I'm aiming for setting and establishing a scene without veering off into cinematography and scenery porn lol

Oh well, if all fails my standing policy for edits is "cut 10% from a story" :)

Lolz scenery porn. I always ask myself 'is this information important to the reader in some way?' Because do they really need to know what kinds of flowers populate the fields and what they're used for by a small segment of people who don't even make an appearance (well a passing mention maybe because someone in the party is allergic).
No?
Cutting room floor.
One story I cut excessive scenery porn and detailed history because it was too much. Though I love detailed worlds and history, not everybody does. I saved myself 100 pages and tightened it up a great deal. Yay for betas

I'm not a fan of 'scenery porn' but I have to admit that sometimes a little goes a long way. As for your example K.P. maybe the flowers are not important, but if you can make the readers smell them, it can help pull them in.

Smell is a sense that is too often neglected in story telling, yet, in the case of flowers for example, it can bring the readers back to a time where they were in a field, thus making it easier for them to imagine the protagonist's surroundings. Same thing for coffee, bacon, even perfume etc. If I say a book smelled of mold, you may already imagine yourself in an attic full of dust and old books before I say anything else.

G.G. wrote: "... in the case of flowers for example, it can bring the readers back to a time where they were in a field, thus making it easier for them to imagine the protagonist's surroundings. Same thing for coffee, bacon, even perfume..."

And finding these points of reference can be important in helping readers find themselves in the world you are building. Coffee may not exist in your world, but if there are sleepy heads and cold mornings there will be a hot pick-me-up equivalent. If it is a carbon-based world, there will be smoke and maybe tar, sewage, and morning breath as well as BBQ and incense. What would any world be without bacon...

Longhare wrote: "And finding these points of reference can be important in helping readers find themselves in the world you are building. Coffee may not exist in your world, but if there are sleepy heads and cold mornings there will be a hot pick-me-up equivalent. If it is a carbon-based world, there will be smoke and maybe tar, sewage, and morning breath as well as BBQ and incense..."

Exactly!

Right! Sense of smell is a bit lost on me, (I have lost mine ... Only extreme smells I can take notice) so I try to remember what things smell like as I world build. I was always told to include the five senses...

There are more than five senses that can be used though. If you have trouble with the smell, you can always use others. Time, space, and unknown are some popular ones.

For instance, you don't need to specify when your story take place if you say: She dipped her quill into the ink and wrote a letter by the candlelight. We would guess pens don't exist yet and neither does electricity.

Another example: In the puddle of water, the reflection of the moon shivered slightly. With only a few words, this sentence tells us the scene takes place outside, at night, and it has been raining.

Very true G.G. And those kinds of sentences are often more interesting to read than the more direct, overt ones.

It all just depends on the circumstance. The same story might contain those efficient sentences that tell you everything at once without actually saying any of it, and then, ten pages later, have three paragraphs detailing a grove of trees. Just depends!

cool tips GG! i never thought of that. i used to write that way but got too many complaints about my extreme verbosity so changed to be more direct and now struggling with being too sparse.

i hope i can find a good balance... will most definitely keep that in mind...

Yep, like in everything, balance is the key. :)

While I like discovering new worlds, I hate excessive world building. By excessive I mean when the author has created all this information about their new world and HAS to find a way to put it in, even if it has no bearing on the plot. That kind of thing slows the pace of the story to a crawl and can definitely lose some readers.
I read a story not long ago that was the classic example of this kind of thing. In about the first three pages, there were something like three lines of dialogue in between paragraphs detailing everyone's back stories (and there were a LOT of people in the scene). In another section, they were approaching a city and on the approach, the author told us all about all the farms surrounding the city and detailed all the different things they grew/had on these farms, even though it had no bearing on the plot whatsoever. There was loads of that kind of thing in that book and it made it so hard to get through it.

lol - my book's gonna piss people off if they aren't into details because I'm seriously into building this world up :)

On a similar topic, what do you think of character descriptions?

Personally, I think character traits and personality are very important to describe, but appearance shouldn't go into too much detail.

But really, I think these things are up to author style and (often petty) reader preferences. I won't judge a writer for going into "too much" or "too little" detail as long as the story keeps me reading.

On a funny note – in "On Writing", Stephen King wrote that characters' physical appearance should be kept sparse so the reader can fill in the blanks him or herself. However, I'm currently reading Carrie for the first time, and he waited until the book was nearly over to mention that Carrie's mother is fat. And I had spent the whole book imagining her as a wiry, witchy kind of woman! It really threw me off.

Timing is important, too...

Yes, I think you need to describe the characters to at least a reasonable degree so that the reader can form a picture in his/her mind. If you don't, your readers might be really thrown by whoever's cast in the role when your book's made into a movie! ;-)

I agree too in that you have to have something there, some kind of a decent description, to let readers know who these people are. If we are supposed to enjoy reading about them for the next few hundred pages, it would be nice to formulate some kind of vision of them as we go. I don't even know if matters how much detail is given, because everyone always seem to come up with their own envisioned character anyways!

I've only built a world in literature twice, one of which was back in high school in Creative Writing class. I made a Fantasy world called Avalon which was inhabited by Androids and Yeti's. They were big on drinking if I remember correctly. Also I made a place called Cardiosovia in Arts class which was ran by Golden Bears who believed in a kind of peace called Soohah.

i like intricate world building. i feel like an explorer visiting these far off places and meeting strange new inhabitants and learning the local geography and history. i just hope my skills are awesome enough to draw in readers.
I'm working on getting back to my old style of writing but now with more life experience and better tools/writing skills (and better cover art!) let's hope it pays off lolz

As a reader, I enjoy details that help color my imagination's understanding and interpretation of the world on the page. It's funny, the only thing that's ever turned me off a book was too many characters, never too much detail.

I actually wrote my first ever steampunk story and briefly talked about a fictitious world. I submitted it to an anthology and I plan on writing two more in the series so I'll give more detail on the world in the next one. Its definitely something new for me as not only am I not used to writing and building worlds but I'm not used to writing steampunk either but I love the challenge.