\n–Stephen Schwartz, CHILDREN OF EDEN<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n
As I said a few posts ago<\/a>, dissertations on craft just ain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t my thang.\u00c2\u00a0 There are people who do it far better than me on I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen discussions of this come up online more and more lately. The consensus seems to be that readers love \u00e2\u20ac\u0153good world building.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But when I see this, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s almost always when the discussion involves genre writing (sci-fi, fantasy, etc.).\u00c2\u00a0 Because of the nature of genre, a high premium is placed on skillful world building. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the backstory that explains the horrific events leading to the creation of the dystopian society. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the laws that govern the use of magic.\u00c2\u00a0 Genre world building can be a bit tricky, especially when it comes to avoiding the dreaded info dump. (Also known as Death by Exposition.) It can be even trickier depending on the voice (first person narrator world building should be an Olympic event). And because of that,\u00c2\u00a0 genre writing is where world building is most likely to go awry, when laying out the societal infrastructure takes pole position over building the character\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s world. Some writers fall so in love with their own backstory that they forget not ALL of it needs to be spelled out or that the story is about the characters, not the fifty years of imagined history that preceded them.<\/p>\n In this year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Printz award winner, SHIP BREAKER, Paolo Bacigalupi does a great job of building his main character\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s world. You get plenty of information about how the world works but you get it through the lens of Nailer, the protagonist.\u00c2\u00a0 His day to day struggle to survive says more about the world he lives in than three or four pages of info dump. Or just look at the first page of MT Anderson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s FEED (an oft cited, yet I still feel vastly underappreciated, book) if you want a master\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s class in down and dirty world building.<\/p>\n Ultimately, though, I think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a mistake to default to genre writing when discussing world building.\u00c2\u00a0 It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s easier to admire because it turns reality on its head in ways the brain can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t ignore. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also easier to deride when it becomes something that is applied with a turbo-powered sledgehammer. But all writing should be about world building<\/em><\/strong>. From your two paragraph flash fiction to your 115,000 word first novel that should probably be half that size. From the story of a young man who extricates himself from an abusive family to the story of a deaf girl who becomes the manager of a rock band.\u00c2\u00a0 There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no spellcasting, no matter transporters, no arenas where children fight to the death.\u00c2\u00a0 But there are still worlds that these characters live in. It may bear a strong resemblance to the world you see every day but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not the same. Because, when done correctly, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re seeing it through the protagonist(s)\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s eyes.<\/p>\n Done correctly? Yes. Because just writing isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t world building.\u00c2\u00a0 It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s far more calculated than that. For me, world building doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t always come out in the first draft.\u00c2\u00a0 I might hint at it but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s later passes where things really begin to flesh themselves out.<\/p>\n The best kind of world building happens without the reader even realizing it.\u00c2\u00a0 It builds slowly, offering insight at impeccably timed intervals. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s insidious, lurking in an offhand comment from a secondary character, tempering the old with the new, taking the familiar and giving it a twist. Most importantly, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an intimate experience. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a protagonist (or protagonists) offering a private, totally subjective tour of their personal human condition. Reliable or unreliable, our narrators accomplish as much through their observations, their philosophies, and their actions as was accomplished in a very famous six day period.<\/p>\n I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d like to see more appreciation for world building in non-genre writing. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s there. Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t let the familiar fool you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “I am an echo of the eternal cry of ‘Let There Be’.” –Stephen Schwartz, CHILDREN OF EDEN As I said a few posts ago, dissertations on craft just ain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t my thang.\u00c2\u00a0 There are people who do it far better than me ontheir blogs.\u00c2\u00a0 But every now and then, a topic comes up that I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianfarreybooks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianfarreybooks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianfarreybooks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianfarreybooks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianfarreybooks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brianfarreybooks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianfarreybooks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianfarreybooks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianfarreybooks.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/brianfarreybooks.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/world.jpg\" "\\"world\\"")
<\/a>their blogs.\u00c2\u00a0 But every now and then, a topic comes up that I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t resist talking about.\u00c2\u00a0 And this one interests me as both a writer and an editor: the idea of world building.<\/p>\n