World-Building 104: Making a World That's Compelling

This is part of a series on fictional world-building. We've talked about how to get started, how to organize your thoughts, and how you can use maps for inspiration and internal consistency.

We've noted several times that world-building can be a huge endeavor. Even if your setting is mostly true-to-life, you're still creating a whole made-up world to immerse the reader in. It can be overwhelming to think of everything that is—or even just could be!—true within your setting.

On top of it all, you want your world to be compelling, to draw the reader in so that they want—no, need!—to know more about its mysteries and what happens next to the characters in it.

How do you do that?

To make a world that's compelling requires two of the same things that make your plot and characters compelling: conflict and theme.

Let me explain.

Conflict

A good plot has conflict—usually grown out of the conflicting goals of the characters within it. Luke Skywalker wants to save the princess from the evil Darth Vader. Eleanor Shellstrop wants to stay in the Good Place even though she doesn't belong there. The Baudelaire orphans want to escape the evil Count Olaf.

These conflicts are what make these stories compelling. We root for these characters and want them to succeed. But the worlds of each of these stories have their own inherent conflicts as well (major spoilers deliberately avoided below):

• In Star Wars, the Galactic Empire oppresses the entire galaxy, while the Rebel Alliance struggles to resist their fascist rule.
• In The Good Place, humans face a universal point system that determines whether they live in paradise or are tortured for eternity.
• In A Series of Unfortunate Events, a mysterious organization secretly helps people and thwarts those who would do harm.

These conflicts are all part of the world-building of their respective settings. They exist whether or not the characters are aware of them or even engage in them.

Though, as you may have noticed, characters are frequently involved in their world's conflict. That's part of what makes their stories so compelling. You certainly can tell stories in these settings that don't engage with the world's conflict (the Star Wars universe does all the time!), but those stories are often seen as side stories—fun but maybe not as compelling as the stories that change the setting itself.

Conflict in world-building provides a deep well of ideas and plots to draw from as you tell your characters' stories. It helps the reader become even more invested in your story.

Theme

Related to conflict is your world's theme. This element often remains under the surface, rarely stated outright and sometimes even ambiguous. Readers may not know or even care what the theme is, but your theme can help you make decisions about what is in the world while also making everything feel more connected.

Again, the world's theme might not be the same as the theme of your story. Star Wars is about a farm boy learning that he is capable of so much more. In The Good Place, a selfish woman learns to live ethically. The orphans of Unfortunate Events learn to navigate a world that is more dangerous than they knew. But each of these worlds also has themes independent of the characters and plots within them:

• The world of Star Wars explores themes of fascism, freedom, and resistance.
• The world of The Good Place explores ethics and morality.
• The world of Unfortunate Events revolves around education vs. ignorance and what it means to do the right thing.

Your world's theme is usually tied to the world's conflict. And yes, your plot's theme will often touch on the world's theme, but it doesn't have to.

Theme aids world-building as a means of making decisions. Say you were creating a new planet in Star Wars, and you're trying to decide its history and characteristics. These could be literally anything—a world within a world! How do you decide?

Well, think about the world's larger theme and conflict. What does this new planet have to do with the rebellion against the Empire? Maybe it's on one side or the other. Maybe it has tried to stay deliberately neutral and uninvolved. These decisions can help guide you as you detail the planet.

Even if the planet has nothing to do with the Empire, the world's theme can guide decisions about the people and culture. How have these people wrestled with fascism, freedom, and resistance? Maybe a local ruler oppresses the local farmers in some way. How? Are the farmers resisting, have they given up, or do they believe the ruler to be beneficent? Or maybe the planet has devised a form of government to prevent fascist rule. What does that look like? How did they arrive at that?

By using the world's theme, we've gone from "This planet can be literally anything! HELP!" to a smaller set of questions that not only focus our ideas but also complement the larger conflicts within the world. The world's theme helps us arrive at decisions while simultaneously making the entire setting deeper, more connected, and more compelling.

Putting It All Together

The best part of world-building is that you can come at these elements from any direction and it still works. Themes might emerge from a conflict you already have in mind. Conflict might be defined by themes you already want to explore. Either might arise from a character or plotline that you've already thought up in your head.

And when you become aware of the conflicts and themes in your plot, characters, and world—and when all those conflicts and themes begin to inform each other—you end up with a world and, more importantly, a story that is even more compelling than the random, cool ideas you scratched down at the start.

Now, you just gotta use that information in an actual draft. We'll talk about that next time.

World-Building 103: Maps!

Today, we're going to talk about one of my favorite parts of world-building: maps! This is the third part of a series on world-building. The first two parts can be found here:

• How to get started
• How to get organized

Often, we think of novel maps as big, complicated (possibly overkill?) illustrations used primarily for secondary fantasy worlds like in the Lord of the Rings or Song of Ice and Fire series. They're pretty and scary and pretty scary when you think about making them yourself!

Big fantasy novels often publish their maps as part of the book, and that's certainly something you can explore, but for our purposes today, we're just talking about maps to help you draft and deepen your world.

These maps can be as big as a world or as small as a village or even a single house. They are not for the reader; they're for you, the author.

An early map I drew for my old Air Pirates novel (that I have to get back to some day)

How Do Maps Help With World-Building?

Maps can provide several benefits to your story, even if nobody ever sees them but you:

• A map helps maintain consistency. Like a world bible, a map provides a way to keep track of things in your story—specifically, where things are relative to each other and how far away they are.
• A map helps you think things through. Drawing a map—like drawing anything—requires dozens of tiny decisions that you might not have thought about if you were just looking at words in a word bible. How large is this place? What does it look like? How far is it from that other place? How did it get there? What resources is it near? It's another avenue of questions to ask that can deepen your world.
• A map can inspire new ideas. You'll start your map with the locations you know, but pretty soon, you'll run into areas that provoke new ideas. What would be located in this space here? How might that impact the people in the other places? What cool thing might go in this empty space?
• A map can immerse you in the world. One reason maps are published in novels is to immerse the reader in their worlds. Making your own map can do the same for you. And as I've said before, if you are immersed in your world, your reader will be too.

The map for my Post-Apoc Ninjas novel

How Do You Make a Map?

There are lots of ways to make your own map, but my preference is to actually draw the thing. You don't have to be an artist, and it doesn't have to make sense to anyone but you, but drawing your own map gives you several advantages over, say, finding or generating a map online:

• It's faster. This feels counterintuitive, but it's true—I've spent enough time with map generators to know. Usually, you spend a lot of time generating new maps (or trying new searches) when it would be much quicker to just do a couple of drafts yourself.
• You get exactly what you want. You may not know what you want right away, but when you start generating maps, you quickly realize you know what you don't want. This is one of the reasons drawing your own map is actually faster. Drawing your own forces you to think it through and make decisions, until you realize you actually do want certain things.
• It's easy to revise. This is another reason that finding or generating a map doesn't work as well: you know it's not what you want, but you can't just tweak things here and there. You have to generate a whole new map with different parameters. Drawing your own map, revision is as simple as a quick erase.

(Interestingly, the same advantages above apply to using AI to create anything—writing a novel or creating an image or whatever. It feels like AI will save you time, but in the end, it actually takes longer and is never quite what you want, and that's not counting AI's other problems.)

A map for a secret project I co-authored with a friend (man, I want to return to this one, too)

How Do You Use the Map?

Most of the utility you'll get from your map will come as you're actually making it—as you're asking and answering questions and recording dozens of large and small decisions. A map can also be an inspiring thing to look at every time you sit down to write.

And, depending on your story, you might occasionally use it to determine times and distances, though this happens a lot less often than you'd think... even in a book that's all about walking:

As you write your story, your map will be useful for reference and inspiration, but always remember one key thing: your reader will never see it. It can be tricky to write for someone who can't see what you see, but as with most things, it's a skill you can learn.

In the end, the goal of your map is not to be perfect or pretty or to ever be seen by anyone. It's help your world remain consistent and to help you immerse yourself in that world. Because when you're immersed in your own world...

You know the rest.

World-Building 102: Getting Organized

Last week, we talked about what world-building is and how to get started. Among other things, we learned that world-building is... well, it can be a lot.

Even if you're just taking regular old modern-day Earth and giving it a small tweak—like humans figure out how to get to Mars or there are actual witches—there are still dozens of questions and implications that you could think through to deepen the world. And for a full-blown secondary fantasy world? The questions are endless.

So today, we'll talk about organizing all of that so you don't get overwhelmed.

1) Start a world bible

A world bible is just a document (or a wiki or a Miro board or something) where you record your ideas and decisions. You'll need this so you can remember them and reference them later.

How you organize your world bible is up to you—the document is literally there to aid you and you alone. I like to separate mine into sections like a historical timeline, nations or kingdoms, sentient species, cosmology (how the world came to be), how magic works, unique plants and animals, etc. Obviously, not every story needs every section, but these are places to start.

Remember, too, that your world bible is a living document. It is for your benefit only, and you can revise and add to it as you need to.

2) Choose a point and work outward

It's overwhelming to try and think about everything at once, but the point of having a world bible is that you don't have to keep it all in your head. You can have one idea, write it down, and then move on to the next.

Maybe a cool idea for your magic system makes you think of some war that might have occurred—jot down the magic idea then move over to the history section. Maybe writing down ideas for that war raises the question of how many nations there are and what state they're in today—scroll down to the list of nations and start brainstorming some ideas for that.

Don't know how to answer a question yet? That's okay. Just write the question down and move on.

What if a new idea conflicts with an older one? That's okay! Again, nobody else is going to read this document, so it doesn't have to maintain internal consistency. I mean, you should try, but you can address conflicts as you discover them.

Often, when a new idea conflicts with something you thought of a while ago, you'll find that the older idea can be easily updated or dismissed. And if it can't, then maybe the new idea can be tweaked. Consistency is important in world-building, and it's a lot easier to create when you haven't even written the story yet.

SIDEBAR: Creating a world bible for collaboration—say, for a video game or when co-authoring a novel—does require more internal consistency. People who are not you will reference the world bible and assume what's in there is fact. The basic ideas in this post still apply though. You and your collaborators just have to do extra work to keep the world bible up to date.

3) Sketch out a timeline of events

I mentioned a timeline as part of the world bible. For me, this is where I often start, and it often becomes the backbone of my world. It helps me to understand how one thing led to another and how everything is connected.

It might not work that way for you, but a timeline is still a good thing to have. Understanding the larger story of your world is a good way to maintain consistency and create real depth.

4) Focus on your story

It's easy to go overboard on details and histories and nations and magic systems and flora and fauna... but remember that you don't have to flesh out everything. You really only need enough details to start writing your story.

When you feel yourself getting overwhelmed with questions or unable to detail some aspect of the world (or unwilling to because it feels boring), take a step back. Ask yourself, "Do I need to know this to write my story?"

Often, you don't.

Because world-building isn't about actually creating an entire world; it's about creating the illusion that you've created an entire world. And that's a lot easier to do.

How do you know when you're done?

The truth is you're never done. There are always more details you can think up (and there always will be when you start writing the story). The good news is that you don't have to be done to start writing.

World-building of the kind I've described above has two main goals: 

1. To help you understand your world enough to start writing
2. To give you extra details to draw from when you need them

We'll talk more about the latter one in a future post. But for now, you know you're done when you feel immersed in the world and ready to start writing the story.

Like I said before, if you are immersed in your world, then you can immerse your reader in it too, and that is the whole purpose of all of this.

World-Building 101: Asking Questions

If you're writing any kind of genre fiction—if there are any fantastical or sci-fi elements in your world at all—you need to do some world-building. This is true whether you're creating a full-blown fantasy world, a sci-fi universe set 100 years in our future, an urban fantasy that's mostly like our world but with some magic in it, or even just our regular world but everybody has self-driving cars now. All of these require some world-building.

So, let's talk about that.

What is world-building? It's you understanding why things are the way they are in your fictional setting and how things are different from our world. It's exploring the "What if?" behind your speculative fiction. What if magic was real? What if we colonized other planets? Even a full-blown fantasy world is a form of "What if?": What if there were a world like ours, except with elves and dwarves, and it was created by some kind of gods?

World-building is thinking through the implications of that "What if?" and then using those implications to flavor your story and immerse the reader.

How do you do it? By asking questions. For example, say your setting is a world exactly like ours except that the city your story takes place in was designed with walkable spaces and public transportation instead of cars. This is mostly (but not entirely) science-fiction, and it raises some questions that you might want to answer, like...

• How long has the city been like this? Was the city always this way, or was it converted from a car-based environment?
• Is it the only city like this, or are most cities in this world like this too?
• How do people feel about it? Is it just normal to them, or is it brand new or even controversial?
• How did the city come to be this way? Is it part of an urban-design experiment, or did the culture shift away from traditional cities because something happened, or something else?
• Does the city's design have a direct impact on the story, or is it more of a backdrop?

With each question, you'll want to explore how that might change things. How do people feel about the city? How does that affect the story?

And as you answer questions, more questions will come up. You might not know or even care about all the answers, and that's okay, but thinking through some of them will enable you to flesh out the world in your mind.

The more you can immerse yourself in the world, the better you'll be able to immerse your readers.

What about deeper world-building, like secondary fantasy worlds? The example above presents only a small change in our world, and already there are a lot of questions and things to think through. How do you create a whole new world?

The same way: by asking questions. For example...

What is a central feature of this world that makes it interesting and/or different from our world? This is usually some form of magic, but it doesn't have to be. For example, the Game of Thrones universe has dragons on one side, White Walkers on another, and a very particular political situation among the humans in the middle. It does have magic, but that magic isn't central to what makes the world unique.

Are there sentient species other than humans? What are they like? Where did they come from (e.g., were they created by gods, or are they an evolutionary branch, etc.)?

Is there magic? Who can do it? How does it work? How long has it existed? What would the implications be on war, economics, and politics if certain spells existed and could be cast by anybody?

What kingdoms, nations, and cultures are there? How are they different? What is interesting and unique about them? Why are they like that?

What are the major historical events that have occurred? How have they affected the people of the present? Were there wars? If so, how big, how long, or how terrible? What do people think of these events now?

Just keep asking questions—the same questions your readers will be asking, in fact. The more you ask and answer, the more fleshed out your world will be.

This all feels like a lot. And it is... and it's just the tip of the iceberg, but it's also a lot of fun!

We'll talk more in future posts about how to organize your thoughts and get the world-building on the page, but to start, you really just have to let your mind wander and ask why?

Think about what excited you about this world idea in the first place. Was it a magic system? A future society living among the stars? A particular "What if...?" that piqued your interest? Start there and branch out, following whatever questions and threads interest you the most. Don't worry about answering everything, just the parts that are exciting to you.

Because if it's exciting to you, it will be exciting to your readers, and that, really, is the whole point.

Making Up Fantasy Languages

It's impossible (perhaps illegal, and certainly blasphemous) to talk about fantasy languages without mentioning the Godfather of Fantasy Language: Mr. John Tolkien. The guy invented languages for fun since he was thirteen years old. He wrote the most epic novel of all time just so he had a place to use those languages.

If that's you, read no further. You're fine.

Most of us, however, did not specialize in graduate-level English philology. So most of us don't really understand how language evolves or what it takes to create an artificial language that has the feel and depth of a real one. That's why a lot of amateur fantasy languages sound silly or made-up.

So how do you create a language that FEELS real, without spending years determining morphology, grammar, and syntax? I'll show you what I do. It's the same thing I do with most world-building: steal from real life, then obscure my sources.

Let's take the phrase "thank you." It's a common phrase, often borrowed between languages (e.g. the Japanese say "sankyu" as borrowed English; in California we say "gracias" as borrowed Spanish, etc).

STEAL FROM REAL LIFE. First I need a source -- some existing, real-world language I can base my fantasy language on. I want it to be somewhat obscure, and I want to show you how you can do this without even knowing the source language (which means no Thai), so I'll pick Malay.

There's lots of ways to find foreign words in a chosen language. If I wanted to be accurate, I'd use 2-3 sites to verify, but I'm making up a language, so Google Translate it is. It translates "thank you" as "terima kasih."

Now that's pretty cool on its own. It's pretty, easy to read, and sounds totally foreign. But despite the odds, somebody who speaks Malay will probably read my novel at some point. That's why we obscure the source. Two ways I do that: (1) alter the letters/sounds/word order of the existing phrase and (2) mix it with some other language.

OBSCURE YOUR SOURCES. For my second source language, I'll pick something from the same family in the hopes it will make my made-up language sound more real. A little Wikipediage tells me Malay is an Austronesian language, and lists the major languages of that branch. I'll use Filipino (just because it's also in Google Translate) and get "salamat."

Then I mish-mash for prettiness and obfuscation. Salamat + terima = salima or salama or, slightly more obscure, sarama. For kasih, I already used the "sala" part of salamat, so I'll take mat + kasih = matak. "Sarama matak." But that feels a bit long for a thank you phrase, so I'll shorten it to "Sarama tak."

And there you go. It was a little work, but a lot less work than it took Tolkien to invent Quenya. If I'm really serious about this fantasy culture/language, I'll keep a glossary of the phrases I make up in my notes, along with a note of what the source languages are (so I can repeat the process to create more phrases that sound like they could be from the same language) and links to the translation sites I used.

If the glossary gets big enough, I might (because I am a bit of a language geek) start converting the phrases into their constituent parts: individual words, verbs, maybe even conjugations. But that's breaching into Tolkien territory where I said I wouldn't go.

Anyway, now you know my secret. Go forth and make cool-sounding languages.

(remixed from an older post)

Using Foreign Words in Foreign Settings

On the post 5 Tips for Using a Foreign Language, Linda asked a very good question: "[What] if the characters are only speaking/thinking one language which is not English but the narrative is in English[:] which words should be in English and which, if any, should be 'foreign'?"

One of my very first writing tutors was Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, and I'm pulling straight from that. If you're a world-builder of any sort, I highly recommend finding a copy of this book.

Technically, any story outside a modern English-speaking setting requires all dialog and narrative to be "translated." This is obvious for a story set in modern-day Japan (where the characters are speaking and thinking Japanese), but it's just as true for stories set in a fantasy universe, medieval Europe, or any setting more than a few hundred years in the future. So this is a common issue.

Tip #1 in my previous post was that someone speaking their native language doesn't throw in foreign terms unless it helps them to be understood. It reads as pretentious. So:

If there is an English word for what you want to say, use the English word. If hobarjee means "duck," then your narrator and characters should say duck.

Only use the foreign word if it refers to a concept for which there is no English word. If hobarjees look and act like ducks, but later on in turns out they shoot laser beams from their eyes, you are fully justified in calling them hobarjees. The word has meaning now that cannot be expressed in our language.

Though I guess you could call them "laser ducks."

Frigging hobarjees

World-Building and the Problem With Quidditch

On Friday, I talked about making up fictional games for your world: take a real-world game and alter it slightly: to suit your world, to make it unique, and (if you're like me) to make an actual game that might be fun to play.

Today we're looking at an example: Harry Potter's Quidditch.

Quidditch is essentially basketball on broomsticks -- with six goals instead of two, extra balls that hurt/distract the players, and the snitch to determine the end of the game. It's a good concept and it totally suits the world. And it's a testament to the books that even though this central game is fundamentally unbalanced, hardly anybody seems to notice.

But yes, it's unbalanced.

The problem is the point value of the snitch. Every goal in Quidditch is worth 10 points, but whoever grabs the snitch simultaneously ends the game and earns 150 points -- 15 goals. The overall effect is that regular goals don't matter.

Unless one team is down by more than 15 goals, right? Then they wouldn't want to get the snitch. There's tension!

Well, yeah, but when does that ever happen? Have you seen a professional soccer game go 16-0? An NFL game with a 112-point gap? Even in the NBA, all-time comeback records don't go much higher than a 16 goal gap. The best strategy to win Quidditch would be to make everyone a keeper until the snitch shows up. Nobody would do that (because it's boring), but any team that did would always win.*

So why does Quidditch work? For the following reasons:

• The protagonist is the seeker. Can you imagine if Harry was the one making meaningless goals, while some minor character caught the snitch and won the game?
• Quidditch wins and losses are not plot critical. If Harry had to win a Quidditch game to save his life, I would be a lot more mad at his team for not being smarter about gaming the system.
• Something else is almost always going on -- like someone's trying to kill Harry or something, so we're invested in something other than the match.

These are good things to keep in mind if you're making your own fictional game. The more the plot focuses on the game, the more that game has to hold up under scrutiny.

And don't bother playing Quidditch in real life. It's not as interesting as it looks (unless you change the rules, of course).


* Though in the books, Quidditch teams are ranked by points scored, not games won. This fixes the brokenness for a tournament, but it makes individual games less interesting, and makes it almost impossible to have a true championship game.

World-Building: Making Up Your Own Games

One totally optional, but (in my opinion) totally fun aspect of world building is making up fictional games for your world. Like holidays and festivals, games unique to your world can give it a deeper feel and provide an endless source of subplots, conflicts, and climactic settings.

And they're easy to come up with: just take a real-world game and change it slightly. Put Chinese chess on a circular board and change the tiles. Play chess with holographic monsters. Combine Blitzkrieg with Stratego.

For a lot of fictional games, the rules don't actually matter. Although fans have made up rules for Avatar's Pai Sho and Song of Ice and Fire's cyvasse, nobody knows the rules used in the actual worlds because they don't matter. The writers have an idea of the basic concepts of the games (taken from the real-world games they combined) and they only reveal what they need to keep the plot moving.


But sometimes you want more than that. A critical event might turn on the outcome of a bet, like in Pirates 2 or Phantom Menace. Or your entire plot might center on a game, like Ender's Battle Room. In these cases, the reader needs to understand and care about what's going on. They need to know the rules.

If you're not into game design, keep things simple. Liars' Dice, podracing, and even the Battle Room are directly translated form real-world games. The writers only made slight alterations for their settings.

If you want something more complicated, be warned: an unbalanced game, whose rules are detailed in the story, will shatter the reader's disbelief. You can solve this by asking, "How could I break this game so that I win every time?" and then fix it, but that's getting into game design techniques, which I don't think you came here for.

Got that? Here's the summary:

• Fictional games are easy to make: take a real-world game and change it slightly.
• If the plot does not hinge on the outcome of a game: be vague about the rules.
• If the plot does hinge on the outcome: stick as close to the rules of a real-world game as possible.
• If the plot hinges on the outcome and you really, really want to come up with something unique: welcome to the world of game design, my friend. Here's a list of games to study up on.

Next week, I'll talk about one particular fantasy game that doesn't work, why it doesn't work, and why the novels end up working anyway. Until then, what are your favorite fictional games and why?

In Favor of Drawing Maps

You guys know I love maps. And though I sometimes resort to quick and dirty tricks to make one, mostly my maps are a labor of love -- one I spend way too many hours on.

It may surprise you, then, that I almost never draw them.

I know, right? I'm willing to draw cheap puns, but not a map for my beloved world. What I usually do is find a map generator that lets me specify parameters and hit the random button a bunch of times until I find something I like. (If that's your style, btw, this program might suit you just fine).

I thought drawing a map would feel artificial. Like it wouldn't look like a map, or it would be too obvious that I created geographical features just to support my story. I thought I needed a map to be given to me, to "discover" the world in a more natural way.

So I would spend hours and hours searching for a generator and clicking "Generate Random Map" until I found one I thought I could work with. Not realizing that I knew what I wanted to work with the whole time and could've sketched it up in a few minutes.

I honestly thought I was saving myself time. The truth (that I'm only now seeing) is that I was afraid of doing it wrong.

When you draw your own map:

• It's faster.
• You get exactly what you want.
• You're reminded just how big a world really is.

 And as for doing it wrong? It's really hard:

• It doesn't have to be pretty, just good enough for you to write from.
• You don't have to be able to draw a straight line. In fact, you shouldn't ever.
• You get to revise.

Let me say that again: YOU GET TO REVISE. My fear of doing it wrong? It's exactly the same fear I have every time I start a first draft. As writers, we know revision is not a bad thing; it's the only thing.

I don't know why I thought map-making was any different.

Have you ever made your own maps? How did you go about it, and what would you do differently next time?

Why Your World is Boring

(remix)

I'm always surprised when someone who loves fantasy tells me they haven't read The Lord of the Rings. I mean, this book is fantasy. And it's awesome! Why have so many people not read it?

I'll give you three reasons: world-building infodumps, plot-stopping songs, and unintelligible languages.

Listen, I know these are what make LotR what it is. I KNOW. But you have to understand that for a first-time reader -- someone who is totally unfamiliar with Middle Earth -- these parts are boring.

Tolkien loved his world -- and rightfully so; it's amazing. But the truth is that if Tolkien tried to pitch it today as his debut novel, he'd be told to cut the word count in half, split the story into smaller parts (oh wait), and for Pete's sake use a 'k' instead of a hard 'c' in your fantasy names!

Sorry.

Many of us who write fantasy fell in love with it because of books like Tolkien's. We created our own worlds, with new races and cultures and politics and histories and languages. We wrote a story in that world.

But you know what happened? Our story became more about the world than the story. And it was boring.

Now we're full grown authors. We know about character and conflict. We're good with pacing and tension. But every once in a while, we start our story off with an infodump prologue, or we toss a 70-line poem into our story "to flesh out the world."

People don't want to read about your world. They want interesting characters to root for. They want a compelling plot. Give them these things and only then will they listen to whatever you've got to say about the history of the Sidhe (or why it's pronounced 'she').

Readers that love your characters will love your world, not the other way around.

What about you? Did you get into fantasy because of Tolkien? Where do you stand on stuff like this:

Go on, John Ronald. Tell me why this was necessary.

The Secret to World Building

"Part of the attraction of the Lord of the Rings is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed."

                               -- J. R. R. Tolkien, Godfather of World Building

The secret to creating a compelling world is to maintain the illusion that there is always more.

The second biggest mistake amateur world-builders make when showing off their world is to explore all of it. The worst is when they let the narrator or the protagonist or, God forbid, some professor character infodump all over the reader about their beautiful world -- all its countries and cultures, its languages and latitudes.

But even those that avoid the infodump -- who take their protagonist through the world so the reader can experience it -- will sometimes make the mistake of showing everything.

As the author, you need to know everything about your world, precisely because of what Tolkien says above. The reader wants hints that the world is much bigger than what they see. And if you always "go there," if you tell them all about it, you destroy the magic.

The Hunger Games still has districts we know nothing about. Mistborn implies the existence of undiscovered metals, with undiscovered powers. Even if you've read everything the Tolkien estate has ever published, there are still places in Middle Earth that you've only heard about. That is what will make your world compelling.

What are your favorite fictional worlds? What parts do you wish you could see more of?

Quick and Dirty World Building

They say you should spend a lot of time crafting your world--the history, traditions, cultures, language. I think that's true. The more detailed your world is, the more it will feel real. But do you really have to flesh out everything?

The correct answer is yes. Yes, you should. So don't tell anybody that I sometimes use the following tricks to speed up my world-building process.

GOOGLE MAPS
Have you ever noticed how fractal geography is? You can zoom in on any part, and it generally looks like any other bit of land. To use this to your advantage, go to Google Maps, find a relatively obscure bit of geography (i.e. don't use Long Island or the SF Bay Area, or anything) and zoom in until it looks like something you can use. Take a screenshot, change the scale, and voila! One fantasy continent.

If you can tell me where in the world these maps are from, you win a custom sketch. Not even joking.

WIKIPEDIAN HISTORY
It turns out history is just as fractal as geography: zoom in on any point, and you can find something to use for your world. Need a war? Take your pick. How about a revolution or a realistic-but-obscure form of government? Wikipedia (and the internet in general) is full of stuff like this. Just change the names and dates, perhaps a few key details here and there, and you've got your own semi-original history.

WIKIPEDIAN CULTURE
The same thing applies to creating a civilization. Do a little research on some unknown people group, then mix and match their traditions and values with some other culture you're into. Choose a technology level, flesh it out by asking how, why, and what result, and pretty soon you have a viable society with relatively little work.


Does this sound unoriginal? Like plagiarism? It's not, really. Stealing from our own world's history, geography, and cultures is no different than creating characters by mixing and matching attributes from yourself and the people you know. Just like making up fantasy languages, the trick is obscuring your sources.

And I'm not suggesting you build your entire world this way. Use this as the foundation, then tweak and twist things as you go. Ultimately the parts you care most about will be the parts that are most originally you, while the rest of the world still feels fleshed out because it has a strong, realistic base behind it.

Anyone have any other quick-and-dirty tips on building a world? I'd love to hear them.

Fantasy Slang: Building a Lexicon

Using the origins of slang I talked about last week, I came up with 120 slang terms and over 50 different idioms for the Air Pirates world. Sound like a lot of work? Well, it was and it wasn't. I didn't do it all at once, but over a long period of time (actually all 19 months I drafted the novel).

It was very hard at first, but once I got some patterns down and got a feel for the air pirates' language it became easier. Here are some things that helped:

UNDERSTANDING THE CULTURE
Many of the methods I outlined last week require an understanding of the culture involved. Metaphors arise from what a culture is most familiar with: a farming culture will use farming metaphors, an underwater civilization will use ocean metaphors, etc. Jargon that has transitioned to mainstream slang will be dependent on the subculture from which it came (in my case, pirate culture).

The Air Pirates' world is one of airships, pirates, and the ever-present fear of dark water. Sam talked about this some in his Talk Like a Pirate Day post. Knowing the foundations of their metaphors made it easier to come up with them. Then I often evolved or shortened them (thus obscuring my sources), but not always. Modern slang is a mix of phrases whose origins are immediately apparent and phrases whose origins have been forgotten. I wanted the Air Pirates' language to be similarly mixed.

TAKING IT ONE STEP AT A TIME
Don't try to come up with 100 idioms at once. That'll drive you nuts, and you won't even use half of them.

While writing Air Pirates, I mostly came up with slang words as I needed them. Sometimes I thought, "I feel like they'd have a special word for this. But what?" But mostly I came up with my own slang whenever I found myself using modern idioms and cliches. This had the added benefit of wiping my manuscript (relatively) clean of cliches.

KEEPING TRACK
Every time I made up a new slang term or idiom, even if I didn't end up using it, I wrote it down in a separate document. Sometimes I'd make up an idiom only to cut it as part of a larger revision. But I still had the idiom saved in my "Pirate Slang" document for use later.

Then every time I needed a slang term or idiom, I'd skim through the existing ones to see if anything fit. Sometimes I'd use a word I already came up with, sometimes not. If nothing else, skimming the old words made it easier to come up with something new that fit the existing pirate lexicon.

And that's pretty much it. Next time I'll talk about how to introduce all this odd slang to the reader without overwhelming them.

Meanwhile, have you ever made up slang for a story? How did you do it?


DON'T FORGET! There's still a contest going on for a free book. Link to the contest post for a chance to win. Read Pawn's Gambit to improve your chances. Contest ends May 6th!

Fantasy Slang: Origins of Slang, Part II

Language evolves in interesting ways, often without its speakers being aware of it. Last time I talked about how slang comes from euphemisms, metaphors, and reverse meaning. Today, let's talk about jargon, shortening, and swearing.

JARGON
Technically, jargon isn't slang. The purpose of jargon is to allow its users to speak more precisely about technical issues in a given field (usually). Slang, on the other hand, is often used to exclude non-members from a group. But the two are closely related, and jargon can become slang over time as knowledge of a field becomes more widespread (e.g. everyone knows what it means to download something now, but in 1980 the word was as obscure as "SNMP" is today).

Jargon can also take the form of a thieves' cant or rhyming slang, where the intent is to exclude. As languages evolves, and these code langauges become more generally known, they can become slang for a whole culture.

Just like their real-world, seaborne brethen, air pirates have their own jargon, some of which has passed to the public. A ship's brig is called the klack (though this meaning now means any prison). Crewmen might be navvies, turners, swabbers, stokers, machinists, gunners, or just plain skylers. And any of those terms have passed into the language as metaphors; for example, a swabber is a generally derogatory term for someone with a crap job.

SHORTENING
Language often evolves to make things quicker and easier to say, to the point of obscuring the origin of the phrase in question. "Goodbye" was once "God be with ye". Internet acronyms occasionally find their way into spoken speech. And no one knows what the heck "okay" used to mean, but nearly every language uses it now.

Almost everything is shortened in the Air Pirates' world. I mentioned the term "baron" last time. And hardly anyone actually says "spot of blue in the dark;" they're more likely to say "a spot in the dark," "a spot of blue," or even just "a spot." Likewise, mercenaries are mercs, anchors are anchs, and centimeters are cents. (That last one actually comes from the Thai language, where shortening words is practically a national sport).

SWEARING
Making up swear words is really, really, really hard. That's because swearing is only effective because we decide it is so (or have been taught so). There is nothing inherent about swear words that make them worse than any other word -- only the meaning we assign to them. Most made-up swear words sound silly to new readers because they have assigned no meaning to the word.

If you decide to make up swear words, imagine what kinds of things would offend members of your culture. References to sexuality, feces, or blasphemy work for almost any culture. But if your culture is particularly fantastic, you might decide other things (i.e. things that are normal to us) are vulgar to them.

I didn't get too creative with the swearing in Air Pirates, preferring instead to choose words that sounded like swear words but weren't. Words like flack and tullit. I also borrowed words from British slang like sod and bleeding, once again giving a feel of swearing without actually being offensive to the (American) ear.

Using euphemisms, metaphors, reverse meaning, jargon, shortening, and swearing, you should be able to come up with a number of phrases to make your made-up culture feel more real. It is a lot of work, but you don't have to do it all at once. I'll talk more about that next time.


DON'T FORGET! There's still a contest going on for a free book. Link to the contest post for a chance to win. Read Pawn's Gambit to improve your chances. Contest ends May 6th!

Fantasy Slang: Origins of Slang, Part I

A while ago, I talked about a method to make up fantasy languages that don't sound made-up. Today I want to talk about slang, where it comes from, and ways to make up your own. If you've read Pawn's Gambit (or this old post), you know the Air Pirates' world has tons of slang. These posts are a taste of how that evolved.

Slang is a bit harder to come up with than fantasy languages. A foreign word can be completely made up and still work, but slang often uses recognizable words in unusual ways. Done wrong, it makes the world feel silly. But done right, it not only makes a fantasy culture feel deeper, it can provide clues to the culture itself.

EUPHEMISM
Slang often arises as a roundabout way of discussing harsh or taboo topics. For example, English has a thousand euphemisms for sex and death. Kicked the bucket. Knocked her up. Sleeping with the fishes. Sleeping with each other. And so on.

In the Air Pirates' world, a pirate might "rack" a girl, especially a "woman of easy virtue" (prostitute). Knockers don't kill people, they pack them (why don't they knock them? I don't know. Language is funny like that).

METAPHOR
Metaphors -- idioms, really -- are slang's cultured cousin. "Bite the bullet" used to be quite literal, but became a metaphor for doing anything painful or difficult. Criminals want to stay "under the radar," even if they've never flown a plane in their lives.

Metaphor is a powerful tool to make up slang unique to a fantasy culture. There's no radar in the Air Pirates' world, but a good pirate knows to stay "in the clouds" even if they're not in an airship. A "spot of blue in the dark" literally refers to ocean without dark water, but mostly means hope in the midst of trouble.

REVERSE MEANING
Remember when "bad" meant cool? How about sick or phat? Sometimes slang is not a new word, but an altered meaning of an old one.

I didn't use this method very often in the Air Pirates' world -- I tried, but the results often sounded contrived. One that worked (for me, anyway) was the term "baron" for a shopkeeper. The idea was that "robber baron" used to be a derogatory term for a merchant who cheated you. Over time it came to be a common title for all merchants, good or bad. When it was shortened to simply "baron", it became almost a term of respect, like a title.


That's enough for now. Next time I'll talk about jargon, shortening, and swearing. Meanwhile, you tell me: where have you seen slang done well? Done poorly? Do you think they used any of these methods, or something else?


DON'T FORGET! There's still a contest going on for a free book. Link to the contest post for a chance to win. Read Pawn's Gambit to improve your chances. Contest ends May 6th!

Google Mini-Rant and Follow-Up Language Tips

I normally love Google, but this Google Buzz thing is bugging me. The problem, as I see it, is that Google signed me up for a social network and started sending my updates to people (that I may or may not actually know, but whom I've e-mailed at some point) without my permission. That's a Bad Thing.

Now I'm not a big privacy nut or anything. But I am a simplify-my-life nut.* I get requests for random social networks all the time, and I refuse them for a reason. Google just skirted around that by not asking me, and then making it ridiculously hard to opt-out of. Thanks a lot, Google. Screw you, too.

* Which is to say I'm a supporter of it. It doesn't mean I'm good at it.


*deep breath*

Okay, enough of that. How about some random tips on fictional languages that didn't fit in last week's post? Sound good? (I swear this will be the last post on foreign languages. At least for a while. Maybe...

Does slang count?)

MAKE IT READABLE. Even if the reader doesn't understand a word, they will still try to mentally pronounce it. It's frustrating if they can't. Wykkh'ztqaff may look very alien and fantastic, but it'll drive the reader nuts trying to say it -- even in their mind. This is especially true for names!

USE LATIN WITH CAUTION. My method last week involved stealing words from real-life languages and mashing them to hide the source. If you use this method, you should know that Latin and some of its siblings (Spanish, French, and Italian, for example) are so familiar to English speakers that it's very difficult to hide them as a source. (Assuming you want to. See parenthetical below for a counterexample to this tip.)

Take the magical words and phrases from Harry Potter, for example. Their origins are obvious (flagrante enchants objects to burn, gemino duplicates objects, lumos makes light, etc, etc, etc). It works in Harry Potter because it's set in the real world, more specifically Europe. It makes sense that their magical language has the same roots as their spoken language (it also makes it easier to remember what each magic word does). But can you imagine Gandalf the Grey using these same words and claiming they were the ancient language of the Valar?

"The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn. I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor... Incendio!"

(Matt Heppe noted in last week's comments that he intentionally used Romanian (a Latin-based language) to give the language a sense of familiarity for English readers. That's definitely a good reason to use Latin. I think, as with anything in writing, intentionality is key.)

WHAT ABOUT ALIEN LANGUAGES IN SCI-FI? It would be a little odd if an alien language sounded like one or more of our Earth languages, wouldn't it? Aliens could be their own post, but off the top of my head I'd say don't use language as we understand it at all. Aliens can speak in hisses, purrs, scents, flashes of color, x-rays, gamma rays, frequencies too low for the human ear to hear... Get creative. Though if you do use a spoken alien language, see the first tip at the top. (There's nothing wrong with spoken alien languages, even if they do sound like ours. I just want to encourage genre writers to stretch their creativity and be intentional about their choices.)

Anyone got any other tips on made-up languages? Do you know any fantasy languages done particularly well? Particularly poorly?

Making Up Words (Without Sounding Like a Dork)

On Wednesday, we talked about using foreign languages in fiction without (a) sounding like a dork or (b) confusing/boring the reader. The bottom line was:

1. Don't do it just to show off.
2. Be intentional; think like the character.
3. Be subtle.

Today I want to talk about a related fantasy topic: making up your own language.

It's impossible (perhaps illegal, and certainly blasphemous) to talk about fantasy languages without mentioning the Godfather of Fantasy Language: Mr. John Tolkien. The guy was a language nut. He invented languages for fun since he was thirteen years old. If this is you, you probably don't need to read the rest of this post. You're fine.

Most of us, however, did not specialize in graduate-level English philology. Most of us speak only one or two languages with any kind of fluency. So most of us don't really understand how language evolves or what it takes to create an artificial language that has the feel and depth of a real one. That's why a lot of amateur fantasy languages sound silly or made-up; it's obvious that they are (made-up, that is).

So how do you create a language that FEELS real, without spending years determining phonology, grammar, or how the presence of two palatal fricative dates back to the Second Age when the Atpians still had two tongues? I'll show you what I do. It's the same thing I do with most of my ideas: steal from real life, then obscure your sources.

Let's take the phrase "thank you." It's a common phrase, often borrowed between languages (e.g. the Japanese say "sankyu" as borrowed English; in California we say "gracias" as borrowed Spanish, etc.).

STEAL FROM REAL LIFE. First I need a source -- some existing, real-world language I can base my fantasy language on. I want it to be somewhat obscure, and I want to show you how you can do this without even knowing the source language (which means no Thai), so I'll pick Malay.

There's lots of ways to find foreign words in a chosen language. If I wanted to be accurate, I'd use 2-3 sites to verify, but I'm making up a language, so Google Translate it is. It translates "thank you" as "terima kasih."

Now that's pretty cool on its own. It's pretty, easy to read, and sounds totally foreign. But despite the odds, somebody who speaks Malay will probably read my novel at some point and scoff. So it's time to obscure. Two ways I typically obscure source languages are: (1) alter the letters/sounds/word order of the existing phrase and (2) mix it with some other language. I'll do both.

OBSCURE YOUR SOURCES. For my second source language, I'll pick something from the same family in the hopes it will make my made-up language sound more real. A little Wikipediage tells me Malay is an Austronesian language, and lists the major languages of that branch. I'll use Filipino (just because it's also in Google Translate) and get "salamat."

Then I mish-mash for prettiness and obfuscation. Salamat + terima = salima or salama or, slightly more obscure, sarama. For kasih, I already used the "sala" part of salamat, so I'll take mat + kasih = matak. "Sarama matak." But that feels a bit long for a thank you phrase, so I'll shorten it to "Sarama tak."

And there you go. It was a little work, but a lot less work than it took to invent Quenya, I'll tell you that. If I'm really serious about this fantasy culture/language, I'll keep a glossary of the phrases I make up in my notes, along with a note of what the source languages are (so I can repeat the process to create more phrases that sound like they could be from the same language) and links to the translation sites I used.

If the glossary gets big enough, I might (because I am a bit of a language geek) start converting the phrases into their constituent parts: individual words, verbs, maybe even conjugations. But that's breaching into Tolkien territory where I said I wouldn't go. Besides which, that would tempt me to break the rules I set forth at the top of this post; they still apply even to made up languages.

So now you know my secret. Now go forth and make cool-sounding languages. Sarama tak.

The Problem With Quidditch

One totally optional, but (in my opinion) totally fun aspect of world building is making up fictional games for your world. Like made-up holidays and festivals, games unique to your world can give it a deeper feel and provide an endless source of subplots, conflicts, and climactic settings.

For a lot of fictional games, the rules don't actually matter. Nobody knows how to play that chess game R2-D2 plays against Chewbacca, but the scene gives the world a deeper feel and gives us a taste of Chewbacca's character (also Han's and C-3P0's). Avatar: the Last Airbender frequently uses a game called Pai Sho to reveal things about one of the characters, but the rules are never explained.

But sometimes you want more than that. A critical event might turn on the outcome of a bet, like in Pirates 2 or Phantom Menace. You might have climactic events that center on the playing field, like Harry Potter's Quidditch. Or your entire plot might center on a game, like Ender's Battle Room. In these cases, the reader needs to understand and care about what's going on. They need to know the rules, which means there need to BE rules.

The easiest way to make a fictional game is to take a real-world game and change it slightly. Take chess and give the pieces fantasy names. Take soccer* and give it two goals instead of one, or play with three teams at once on a circular field. But whatever you do -- whether you vary a real game or invent one of your own -- it needs to be a game that, for the most part, would make sense in the real world.

Here's where Quidditch fails. The made-up game starts okay: basically basketball with broomsticks, three goals per team instead of one, extra balls that hurt/distract the players, and a snitch to determine the end of the game. None of these variations break the game, and they all make it more interesting. If we had flying broomsticks and semi-sentient balls, this is a game we could play in the real world.

The problem is the point value of the snitch. Every goal in Quidditch is worth 10 points, but whoever grabs the snitch simultaneously ends the game and earns 150 points -- 15 goals. The overall effect is that regular goals don't matter. Ever. Unless the score reaches 15-0,** the rest of the game has exactly the same tension as if both teams just sat around and waited for the snitch to show up (which, really, why don't they?).

The only reason we don't notice is because the protagonist is the one who gets the snitch. Can you imagine if Harry was the one making meaningless goals, while some minor character caught the snitch and won the game? We also don't notice because usually something else is going on during the match -- like someone's trying to kill Harry or something -- so we don't actually have to pay attention to the match. But to me, all the wizards who go crazy over every goal seem silly and short-sighted.

So by all means, include made-up games in your world. But give them some thought. They don't have to win Game of the Year or anything, but they should at least make real-world sense.

Though I guess if you really are writing the next Harry Potter, it doesn't matter.

UPDATE: As I mention in the comments, I do like Harry Potter. A lot. It has it's flaws, but there's a reason I own all seven.


* A term I use, not because it's correct, but because it's the least ambiguous. They call it football in Thailand too.

** Which is ridiculous. When was the last time you saw a soccer team up 15-0? Or an American football game at 105 to nothing? Unless you were watching Big Leagues Beat Up on Tiny Tots Day, these scores just don't happen. Not at a professional level anyway.

Believing in a World

Chapters Edited: 15
Scenes Edited: 47
Words Murdered: 2904 (5.2%)

Confirmed Kills: 1 (Geez, that's it?)
Mutinies: 1
Authority figures Sam has a problem with: All of them

---------------------------

A writer has to believe in their story. That's a given. A writer has to believe in their world - that's a corollary. But how far does that go? Tolkien wrote about immortal elves that left our world behind. Orson Scott Card described a future endangered by buglike aliens and saved by a pre-teen genius. But they didn't believe these things were really true.

Or did they?

When I was planning Air Pirates, I discovered that, while the worlds I created didn't have to be real, I needed to believe they could be.

The Air Pirates world sprung out of science fiction. I needed a world that was like Earth, but wasn't. At the same time, I didn't want to just take Earth and rename it. If names, cultures, and languages were going to be like Earth's, there should be a reason, I thought. I wanted the people of Air Pirates to be from Earth.

And so they are. They're distant descendants of Earth, whose ancestors arrived on the planet via a generation ship, though they don't know it. Nearly all of their knowledge was lost when the generation ship crashed into the sea.

Here's where it gets weird (or where I get weird - take your pick). The survivors lost everything - technology, history, even theology... and that was my problem. I'm a committed Christian, and so believe that God created us for a purpose, with an end in mind. The traditional end being, of course, the horrors and glories found in Revelation, when Jesus returns and God ends this world.

But I've read lots of stories that don't fit - and in many cases, outright reject - this worldview, and I've never had a problem with it. My capacity for belief-suspension is pretty dang high. But for some reason, I couldn't write about a world where clearly the Bible was wrong. My heart wasn't in it.

So I included God in my world. Not just by giving them religion, but by imagining how a forgotten colony could fit into God's plan. If a remnant of humanity left Earth, wouldn't God send his Word with them too, somehow? Though all their history was lost?

Enter the Brothers and Sisters of Saint Jude. Decades after the crash, when civilization had stabilized and the first generation had almost passed away, a group of people came together and tried to reconstruct the Bible. Knowing their project to be imperfect, they named the result the Incommensurate Word of God.

Air Pirates isn't about all this stuff. The monks only show up in one chapter, and their history is only briefly mentioned as world candy. The origins of the world aren't even touched on (in this book).

But they're there. They have to be, for me.

Anyone else get weird about their world building like this? Or maybe you have your own (less weird) world building stories to share?