World-Building 105: Putting It on the Page

To recap the last few posts, we've talked about the following:

• What world-building is and how to get started
• How to keep your world-building organized
• The helpfulness of maps (yay!)
• How to make a setting compelling

So far, 100% of the info created through these tips is for you, the author—notes, maps, lists, Q&As. These are aids in writing your story, not the information you actually show the reader.

Because the goal of world-building is not to show the reader all the cool stuff you thought up but to immerse them in another place and time, to make them feel like there's more to the world than what they see, to help them believe this is a real place that could exist.

So, how do we do that with *waves hands around* all those notes and maps and junk?

Using World-Building in Your Draft

As you write, you will naturally drop hints about your world. Sometimes you have to explain things for the plot. Other times, you're just describing what's in the scene. Either way, something comes up that you can't assume the reader knows. Like...

The protagonist will be looking at the stars, and you mention the setting's two moons. The protagonist steps on a teleporter and thinks about how the technology works. Or they learn that they are part of an ancient prophecy that you now need to explain to the reader.

Or a thousand other tiny details that come up as you draft. Wherever it happens, you'll want to keep two things in mind:

1. Let the reader believe there is more to the world than what you're telling them.
2. Let the reader experience the world rather than be told about it.

These are guidelines, of course, and you'll have to find a balance. But the goal is to maintain the illusion that there is always more to discover.

"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 a 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

Right, But... How?

Well, for example, as you describe the setting's two moons, do so through the protagonist's perspective. How do the moons make them feel? Maybe they're lost in a forest but thankful for the light of the two moons to guide them. Maybe they used to look at the moons as a child and felt safe under one and uncomfortable under the other. In this way, we experience what the protagonist is experiencing, and the world-building is deepened at the same time.

Or maybe in your world bible, you know that the moons were set there by the gods or that one of the moons houses a magical prison. Or maybe you know nothing more about them at all—that's fine too! But as you describe them in your draft, you don't say what you know them to be, but you might say what people believe them to be. Like, maybe the protagonist's grandmother used to tell them a story about the moons that they now think is silly (but that maybe has a grain of truth to it—or not!).

Or maybe they're just moons. That's fine too.

What about the teleporter?

You probably don't want to go into the whole history and function of the technology unless that's a thing the protagonist would be thinking about (maybe they built them!). But again, how does the protagonist feel about teleporters? How do they think they work? Maybe they don't know at all, and that worries them every time even though they've used them their entire life. Maybe they heard a story about someone who got messed up by one, and they wonder if it's scientifically accurate. Maybe they have full confidence in them and quietly judge the folks who fear them.

Little extra thoughts like these help us experience the teleporter while also suggesting that there might be more to it than we know—there's more to discover.

And the prophecy? Don't exposit the prophecy like a history textbook. Reveal it through the lens of the character who explains it and of the protagonist themselves. How do these two characters feel about it? What does it mean to them? Do either of them doubt the prophecy? Fear it? Zealously believe it?

Again, now we're experiencing the world-building. It matters to us because it matters to characters that we care about.

And also, we're never getting the whole story (that's in your world bible) but rather what the characters know or believe about it. This way, the world always remains bigger than anything the reader can experience.

Avoiding(?) Infodumps

We're often told to avoid the dreaded infodump. As with most things, this is more what you'd call a guideline than an actual rule, but the reason infodumps are dangerous is because (1) they tend to be telling rather than allowing the reader to experience the world, and (2) they tend to tell everything the author has ever thought.

But that doesn't mean you can't use them. An infodump from an in-world narrator's perspective, that also leaves some things mysterious, can be just as compelling as any bit of action.

Leaving some mystery can help a world feel real and lived in, like there's always more to discover just around the next corner. It's a type of mystery that can pull your reader into the world.

And letting the reader experience the world through your characters keeps them invested. They want to learn about the prophecy because their favorite character's goals depend on it. They want to know how the teleporter works because Captain Dan wants to know (or because he already does know, and who doesn't want to be cool like Captain Dan?).

All those notes you took answering questions and organizing your thoughts give you a deep well to draw from as you guide your protagonist and your reader through the world. You'll think of new things as you draft, and you can add those to your notes, too. Every bit of it makes your world deeper, more immersive, and more real.

Just remember to keep some of those bits for yourself.

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.

Setting Up Character Growth

Writing a compelling story requires a lot of ingredients. One key ingredient is the character arc.

Compelling characters—especially protagonists—usually grow and change over the course of the story. They learn something about the world or themselves, and this knowledge changes the way they live their life. This is, of course, talking about a traditionally Western style of story, but if you're publishing in the Western market, you'll want to know this.

Character growth is compelling because we want to believe that people can grow and change—we want that for ourselves. It's compelling because the character has a dream and strives to achieve it despite all odds, and we love that. That's the kind of character we can root for and identify with.

What if you designed the character and obstacles in your story such that they are diametrically opposed? A pacifist must defeat a murderous dictator. A rebellious loner must trust others in order to stop a great danger. A nervous homebody must overcome their fear to rescue someone they love. The character is ill-equipped to face the obstacles in their way, and the only way to achieve their goal is to grow.

It's a compelling arc, which is why you see it everywhere in fiction. It might look like this:

1. A character believes something that has served them well their whole life. Neo believes he is nobody special. Shrek believes he's unworthy of love. Hiccup believes he is a bad Viking.
2. The character wants something that cannot be achieved with their old beliefs. Neo wants to understand the Matrix, but he must become special to survive. Shrek wants Lord Farquad to leave him alone, but he must rescue a princess to do it. Hiccup wants his father to accept him, but he has to be a good Viking to do it.
3. There comes a crisis point where the character tries to solve the problem the old way, and it fails them. Neo's mentor is going to die, so Neo tries to fight using what he knows. Shrek realizes he loves the princess. Hiccup is torn between pleasing his father and protecting his dragon Toothless.
4. At their lowest point, the character must learn something new. Neo nearly dies, until he sees the Matrix for what it really is. Shrek decides to risk everything for his love. Hiccup decides to be the kind of Viking he wants to be.
5. The story's climax shows the character stepping into this new way of being. Neo defeats the Agents. Shrek and his friends stand up to Lord Farquad. Hiccup and Toothless rescue Hiccup's father.

The character at the end is different than they were at the beginning. If the character-at-the-end had faced the same inciting incident, maybe the story would never have happened! That's true growth.

Of course, this is just one way to draw a compelling character arc. It's effective, but it's not a formula—merely a framework that you can customize for your story. Experiment. Try new things, and see what works for you.

And then do that.

The Pressure We Put On Ourselves

A lot of what I write here is projection. That is to say, a lot of my advice are things I need to remind myself. And one thing I constantly struggle with (as do many writers) is the fear that what I'm writing isn't very good.

This fear is paralyzing. It frequently makes me not want to write at all.

But here's the thing. The part of you that is afraid, that puts pressure on you to MAKE IT GUD OR WHAT'S THE POINT, is—believe it or not—trying to help you. It wants you to create amazing things, and it believes that you can! But it doesn't realize that the pressure it's putting on you is actually having the opposite effect.

That's because the pressure used to work. When you started writing, you pushed yourself to improve, to get your butt in the chair, to get the words out. That pressure is what got you on the writing path in the first place. (Probably. I'm definitely projecting now.)

But the pressure didn't stop, and people can't live under pressure all the time forever. Writing is a marathon, not a sprint, but that pressuring part of you wants you to run your hardest the entire time.

What I've had to learn is how to be kind to myself. I need to give myself permission to suck, of course, but I also need to be kind to that part that's yelling at me all the time. It's just doing what worked, and in truth, I don't want it to stop completely. I just want it to trust me.

For me, that involves a lot of self talk. Whenever I'm doing something hard, especially writing, I end up having a conversation something like this:

ME: This sucks. What's the point?

ALSO ME: It won't suck when it's finished.

ME: It'll take so much work to get there though.

ALSO ME: That's okay. We've done it before. We'll do it again.

ME: What if it never gets better?

ALSO ME: It will. It always does.

ME: What if this time's different?

ALSO ME: Then we'll figure it out when we get there.

And so on.

In the past, I would get depressed or angry with myself for not being good enough. Now, I'm trying to be kinder, to talk myself through it. I've written stories before, and I'll do it again. It's always hard, but I know how to do the work to make the story better. I know I can do it.

You can too.

What Readers Really Want

“And so,” he said, “in the end, what must we determine? Is it the intellect of a genius that we revere? If it were their artistry, the beauty of their mind, would we not laud it regardless of whether we’d seen their product before?

“But we don’t. Given two works of artistic majesty, otherwise weighted equally, we will give greater acclaim to the one who did it first. It doesn’t matter what you create. It matters what you create before anyone else.

“So it’s not the beauty itself we admire. It’s not the force of intellect. It’s not invention, aesthetics, or capacity itself. The greatest talent that we think a man can have?” He plucked one final string. “Seems to me that it must be nothing more than novelty.”

—Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

As much as we write for the love of storytelling, most of us also want our writing to be popular. We try to write what people want to read, what's popular, or what speaks to the current moment. The publishing industry compounds this, publishing something people really like, and then—whether serendipitously or to cash in on a trend—they publish a bunch of other things like it.

That's not to say follow-ups are all clones. They are often very good on their own! But the sameness of a genre can wear out the audience, and eventually, a lot of readers no longer want to read stories about, for example, dystopian YA or magical schools. (More's the pity.)

We can't control the publishing industry, but we can control what we write. We can't know what will sell, but we know what people want. They want to be surprised and delighted and entertained, and the way to do that—just as Brandon Sanderson's character Wit points out above—is to give them something new.

Readers get bored when they can predict what will happen or when they feel like they've seen something before, but we love novelty.

And there's nothing in this world more novel than you.

I do think it's important to be aware of trends, and it's no good trying to avoid all the tropes (it can't be done), but the most important thing is to write something you like and to infuse it with your unique heart, voice, and experiences.

Because whether they know it or not yet, that is what readers really want.

Injecting Emotion

Most writers don't think of ourselves as actors, but we are a little bit. We have to imagine what our characters are feeling and then portray it. It's just that writers portray it slowly on the page (and revised over time) rather than in the moment with our voices and bodies. It's a different medium, but the goal is the same: to connect with the audience, to make them feel what we feel.

I've talked before about using description to convey emotion. Among other things, I said, "Think about what's happening in the scene—what can be seen, heard, felt, smelled, or even tasted. Then, think about what the characters are feeling and use that to color what is described and how."

Let's go a bit beyond that. What if you didn't just think about what your characters are feeling? What if you felt it too?

Of course, every writer's process is different, but it's likely you're already doing this—at least sometimes. You may have become sad when you had to kill a character or gotten angry at something your villain did. That's what this is. All you gotta do then is use it.

Take those emotions and describe them: what your body feels or how your feelings color the world around you. Your description doesn't have to be perfect (it's not gonna be—it's a first draft!), but there will be gems in there. More importantly, that initial description will help you feel those feelings again when you revise, so you can fine tune it to better describe what you were feeling at the time.

Right, but... How?

Some people struggle with feeling these emotions. I certainly did. For most of my life, I considered emotions untrustworthy, something to be avoided. That belief led me to shunt my emotions down until I didn't feel them anymore. (Or rather, I thought I wasn't feeling them. In truth, I didn't recognize them for what they were, but they created all kinds of stress and anxiety, among other things. But that's a whole other post...)

If this resonates with you too, here are some tips that might help you tap into your characters' emotions better, thus helping your readers do the same.

Act out the scene. Put yourself in your characters' shoes, not just in your head but physically. (If you have a willing friend, act it out with them—maybe even talk about what both of you are feeling afterward.)

Draw from your experiences. Maybe you've never had to flee from a deadly assassin or walked through a haunted wood, but you have been scared. Think about times you felt something like what your characters are feeling and put yourself back in that situation. What did it feel like? What was going on with your body? Can you feel those feelings again?

Learn from the acting world. Actors have to be in touch with their emotions, and we can learn a lot from them. I'm not saying take acting lessons or join a troupe (though those would certainly help improve your writing!), but maybe read some articles about acting or improv. Learn about what actors do that we don't normally think of.

Play D&D or other tabletop RPGs. Tabletop RPGs are a fantastic and relatively safe way to practice putting yourself in someone else's head. Granted, most TTRPG groups aren't going to deep-dive into emotional acting, but they are an entertaining way to imagine what someone who is not you might feel or do in situations you've never been in. (It can also be another method to practice a bit of improv!)

Do some inner work. I'm not suggesting you seek counseling to become a better writer, but if you're struggling with emotions—whether your own real-life emotions or feeling the imagined ones of your characters—maybe process why that is. Emotions are a normal and vital part of being human (and a critical part of writing). It's well worth exploring our own issues with them.

Again, every writer has their own process. It might be that none of this is for you, and that's fine. But if you're seeking to better connect readers with your characters, I hope you can find something useful here.

How to Write in Dark Times

It is objectively difficult to create when it feels like the world, including the networks and structures we take for granted, is crumbling around us—even more so when it actually is. But art in all forms is a critical kind of resistance and reconstruction, and it's one way we can actually help.

But what the heck do you write about when everything is terrible?

Thankfully, we're not the first to experience this. Writers have been writing in dark times for as long as there have been times. Stories didn't stop being told just because there were world wars, global depressions, or raging pandemics. In fact, many of our best stories were created from those times.

With that in mind, here are some of the reasons I and others continue to write.

To Give People Hope

A story can give people hope that the darkness can be beaten, that even the smallest person and the smallest act can matter. For example, J.R.R. Tolkien drew on (among other things) his experiences in World War I to write The Lord of the Rings, even as he lived through the build-up toward World War II.

Stories can give people hope for a better future, like Susan Kaye Quinn's Nothing Is Promised hopepunk series, written amidst the ever-present doom of our climate crisis yet presenting a vision of what humanity is capable of.

To Give People Inspiration

The darkness can be beaten, but how do we beat it? Your story might address this more directly, presenting a dystopian world and the hard-pressed, reluctant heroes who tear it down—for example, Suzanne Collins' Catching Fire, Lois Lowry's The Giver, or Alan Moore's V for Vendetta. It's fiction, yes, and not an instruction manual, but stories like these can be the seeds for real-world ideas (or in some cases, real-world warnings).

To Shine a Light on the Truth

Many stories, especially those by authors from underrepresented or oppressed groups, reveal truths that majority culture is often blind to. These are the kinds of stories that can change someone's entire worldview, and humanity needs as many as we can get.

R.F. Kuang's Babel takes a scathing look at the former British Empire and the cultures that were crushed to create it. It raises critical questions of whether an invincible power can be fought at all and, if so, how—all while telling a gripping historical fantasy tale.

Celeste Ng's Our Missing Hearts paints a vision of a terrifying America-that-could-be (one that feels increasingly real in today's political climate) and asks the reader to consider how such a thing could have happened and what they might do within it.

To Increase Empathy

Not all stories need to touch on dystopia to make a difference. Every story is an exercise in empathy, especially the most personal ones, and empathy is critical to pull us out of the darkness.

In Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng writes about a town that believes itself to be uplifted yet struggles when faced with its own underlying biases. There is no great villain nor power to be toppled in this story, but it nonetheless forces us to empathize and wrestle with multiple perspectives on difficult moral questions.

(Honestly, all of Celeste Ng's work is amazing. I can't recommend her enough.)

To Provide an Escape

Not all stories need to inspire or teach or represent. A story that is merely an escape is every bit as vital during dark times. When every headline feels worse than the one before, despair comes all too easily. But despair is how the darkness wins. In a fight like that, joy and escape become lifelines and weapons.

My examples, of course, are from my own interests—what I have read and remember (hence all the sci-fi and fantasy). But there are so many good examples I am omitting here. Please, recommend your own stories-from-dark-times in the comments. We want to read them!

I Have to Rewrite the Whole Thing?!

They say you have to murder your darlings, and you think, sure, I get that—a phrase here, a sentence there... But what if the feedback is that a whole scene isn't working? Or a whole chapter? What if you're asked to add or remove an entire character or, God forbid, rewrite the entire novel?

Why would you even consider that? There are lots of possible reasons. Here are a few off the top of my head:

• A chapter isn't working and needs to be cut entirely or replaced with something else.
• You removed an entire character and need to rewrite whole chapters or scenes.
• A hard drive crash caused you to lose a huge chunk of work.
• After finishing a first draft, you realize you love the world and characters, but the plot isn't working at all.
• You returned to an old draft after several years and want to update it with everything you've learned.

Rewriting something you've already written feels bad, hard, impossible. It took so much work to get those words there in the first place—why would you want to do it again?

Let me reassure you that, while it does feel scary, a rewrite is never as bad as you think it will be for one simple reason:

You already did it once.

What's hard about writing something the first time is that you don't know what will happen or who the characters are or how to say what you want to say. But after having written it once, a lot of this mental work is already done! And if you've lost work and are just trying to redo it, it's even easier. You don't have to think about changing anything—you can just try to remember what happened and write it as though you had outlined it already.

The fear of rewriting largely comes from this unexamined idea we have that what we wrote the first time was good, and we're afraid we won't be able to replicate it again. But you absolutely can.

You did it once. You can do it again.

What's even better, the act of a rewrite allows you to improve what you had written, because you're not starting from scratch. You have a foundation to work from—even if it's just in your head—and you can actively improve on that foundation as you rewrite.

Most of the time, doing a rewrite is optional. But if you're willing to try, you can find great freedom and flexibility in your story. You'll discover what I said in a previous post: that your novel is always soft and malleable. And when you've finished, you'll often find that you love the new version more than you ever loved the original...

...you know, the one you thought you could never recreate.

Perhaps most importantly, you'll begin to learn to trust yourself—your skill, craft, and experience. And that is where the really good writers are born.

Seeing What the Reader Sees

One of the hardest but most important aspects of editing your own work is reading it with fresh eyes. You can (and should!) do this with beta readers or by hiring an editor, but being able to do it yourself is so, so valuable.

But how the heck do you do that? After all, when you're reading your own work, you not only know what's going to happen but also what might happen, what never happened, and what happened once in an old version like seven revisions ago!

You have to get out of your head. You have to read your own work as though it were the first time you've ever seen it. You know nothing that isn't on the page! It's not easy, but here are some tips to make it possible.

TAKE A BREAK. This is probably the most common advice. Step away from what you wrote for a while—days, maybe weeks or even months if you can. When you come back to it, you might have forgotten parts, but more importantly, your brain will have the opportunity to approach it like a new thing. That feeling won't last through the whole novel, but hold on to it as long as you can. Also...

TAKE NOTES. As you read your novel with fresh eyes, write down facts and details—especially things that you know have changed from outline to draft or from revision to revision. But—and this is the most important thing—you cannot write down anything that is not on the page! Write down what you see, not what you think you see.

PRACTICE. Believe it or not, seeing a familiar document from a fresh reader's perspective is a skill you can improve at. How do I know? It's literally my job. The more you do it, the easier it will be to see a manuscript the way a new reader would see it, setting aside all the extra information floating around in your head.

This is a very important skill for writers to learn. Beta readers are amazing, and a good editor is well worth the money, but you are the only person in the world who fully understands your intent and your vision. If you can maintain both readers in your head at once—one who has never read this before and the other who knows what you want it to become—you can do anything.

Who Are You Writing For?

With the US's ongoing slide into a literal banana republic,* it is very difficult for me to think about writing and writing tips. I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

* Wikipedia defines a banana republic as a country with an economy of state capitalism, where the country is operated as a private commercial enterprise for the exclusive profit of the ruling class. Show me the lie.

But one thing I keep thinking about—that applies equally to writing a sci-fi novel or arguing on Facebook—is who are you writing for?

Because here's the thing. There will always be people who don't like what you have to say. They will tell you your story is slow or predictable or confusing or has too many made-up words. They will try to convince you that the US government's actions aren't authoritarian actually, and why do you keep comparing everything to Nazis?

These people are not your audience.

Write for the people who enjoy your work, who identify with your characters, who know it's unconstitutional for press outlets to be denied access because they still call it "Gulf of Mexico."

I mean, sure, you want as many people as possible to enjoy (or agree with) your writing, and you should continue to work on your craft (and empathy and accurate information) toward that end.

But you can't please the haters. Don't spend your time on it. Diluting your vision can rob your work of what makes it unique and valuable. Arguing with someone who believes Elon's dismantling of the government is fine, actually, wastes both your time and theirs (not to mention the mental health costs of arguing online).

Remember who you're writing for. They're your people. Write for them.

You don't even have to acknowledge the others.

What To Do With All That Feedback

If you're serious about writing, then you need to be serious about getting feedback. You might ask friends to read your work, swap drafts with writers online, or hire an editor—or even all of the above! The bottom line is you're too close to your story to be objective, so you always need to see how it flies with other people.

And when you do, you will often find one or more of the following happens:

• Readers provide conflicting feedback—one likes a passage, while another hates it.
• One reader suggests a sweeping change that changes your vision for the novel—it's not what you were trying to do.
• A reader hates a part that you absolutely love.
• Readers are confused about something you know you explained.

It can be frustrating, especially for new writers, to try to figure out how to handle feedback like this. You want to please everybody, but it seems impossible!

A key way to approach this is to treat the feedback like a doctor: interpreting it as symptoms, diagnoses, and prescriptions.

SYMPTOMS are what the reader feels as they're reading. Maybe they're confused, frustrated, or bored. The important thing to remember is that the reader is (almost) never wrong about what they feel. It doesn't matter what you intended; if the reader is bored, they're bored. Start there.

Many readers will then try to provide a DIAGNOSIS of what they think the problem is. They might think they're bored because they don't care about world-building, or they're confused because a fantasy term wasn't explained properly. Remember that the reader is not your doctor. They are usually right about what they're feeling, but they're not always right about why.

Maybe the world-building is really interesting, but in that particular moment in the story, the reader cares more about whether the protagonist escapes the people hunting them. Maybe the fantasy term is explained perfectly fine later, but there needed to be just a little more context so the reader could understand the sentence where it was introduced. (Or maybe that particular reader isn't used to holding things in abeyance.)

Readers aren't always aware of what causes their feelings, but if you assume that their feelings are real, then you stand a much better chance of addressing the root cause of the problem.

Finally, some readers will try to PRESCRIBE A SOLUTION. Readers are often wrong here. They know what they're feeling, they maybe know why, but they aren't you. They don't know your story or what you're trying to accomplish. They don't live in your head. Most people's prescriptions are likely to be wrong.

Who Can You Trust?

It's important to learn who to trust. Trust readers to know what they're feeling, but beyond that? It depends.

You can probably trust readers who are fans of books like yours. They might know the market better than you, or they might have insight that you lack. Their solutions might not perfectly fit your story, but their diagnoses might spark some good ideas.

You can usually trust readers you've worked with or those who really get your work. You'll know these folks from your relationship with them.

You can often trust professionals. Editors aren't perfect—they can provide bad diagnoses and prescriptions like anyone else—but the more experienced they are in your genre, the less likely they are to give you bad advice.

More than anyone else though, trust yourself. You alone know your story and what you are trying to accomplish, and you alone are responsible for turning the story into whatever it becomes.

Sometimes, a reader's diagnosis or prescription will feel right—it will strike a chord, possibly even solving multiple problems for you at once. This is great! It's exactly what you want feedback for.

But other times, a prescribed solution won't sit right, and you won't really know why. Trust your feelings, but don't ignore the feedback entirely. Something didn't work for the reader, and it's up to you—and only you—to figure out what.

If it's not an experiment, why bother?

I've had to take an extra break here due to sickness (and what a time to take a break!), but I read something a few days ago that's stuck in my head. It's from this article by David Moldawer about how your technique will never be good enough (meaning that's not a reason to stop creating):

"If it's not an experiment," Schütte writes, "why bother?" Any new work is an experiment. How can any experiment be executed perfectly? What you're about to write hasn't ever been written before, right? That means no one's ever read it. Therefore, you have no way of knowing for certain how it should be received, let alone how it will. How can you perfect your approach to making something no one's ever made before?

I have spent a significant amount of my writing time worrying about finding the perfect words, the perfect characters, the perfect plot—worrying so much that I often don't write at all. I know I am not alone in this.

And that's why this stuck in my head. The story I'm working on is an experiment. It's literally never been told before, and nobody knows how it should be told. How could they?

And so... how could I possibly know?

The only way to figure out how to tell the story is to put words on the page and see what it's like. Try things. Change things.

Experiment.

It's almost freeing when you think about it like that.

How to Write SFF: The Concept of Abeyance

If you're going to write sci-fi or fantasy, then you need to know about abeyance. Abeyance in fiction is the reader's willingness to trust that something they don't understand will be made clear later.

All fiction uses abeyance to some extent. For example, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time begins like this:

2.           It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears's house. Its eyes were closed.

On first read, the reader doesn't know what dog, why its eyes are closed, or who Mrs. Shear is,* but they trust that the author will fill them in eventually. That's what good fiction does.

* They also don't know why the first chapter is number 2 instead of number 1, which is a pretty cool and subtle bit of abeyance on its own.

All fiction does this—it's part of the mystery that draws readers in—but sci-fi/fantasy takes abeyance even further, casually using made-up words as though the reader already knows what they mean.

Take a look at these examples. Terms or phrases in bold require some level of abeyance:

[Foundation by Isaac Asimov] His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before. That is, not in real life. He had seen it many times on the hypervideo, and occasionally in tremendous three-dimensional newscasts covering an Imperial Coronation or the opening of a Galactic Council. Even though he had lived all his life on the world of Synnax, which circled a star at the edges of the Blue Drift, he was not cut off from civilization, you see. At that time, no place in the Galaxy was.

[The Peripheral by William Gibson] They didn't think Flynne's brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him. They said it was like phantom limb, ghosts of the tattoos he'd worn in the war, put there to tell him when to run, when to be still, when to do the badass dance, which direction and what range. 

[The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien] In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort. 

[Dune by Frank Herbert] By the half-light of a suspensor lamp, dimmed and hanging near the floor, the awakened boy could see a bulky female shape at his door, standing one step ahead of his mother. The old woman was a witch shadow—hair like matted spiderwebs, hooded 'round darkness of features, eyes like glittering jewels. 

["Pawn's Gambit" by Adam Heine (me)] The netter’s timing couldn’t have been worse. I’d been in Savajinn a week, looking for a knocker named Tarc. A whole bleeding week. When Tarc finally agreed to meet, at the Sick Savaj, that’s when the netter decided to show up. 

Some of these terms are explained shortly after. For example, Tolkien explicitly describes what hobbits are but only after a page or two of acting as though the reader should already know.

Some of them are obvious from context. For example, bleeding is obviously an intensive like "damned" or "bloody."

Others are never explained directly but their meanings are clarified through later context. For example, Foundation eventually addresses the Empire and Synnax, and "Pawn's Gambit" eventually hints that a netter is something like a bounty hunter.

Some of these aren't literal terms at all. "A witch shadow," for example, isn't meant to be literal, but in speculative fiction, the reader can't be sure until they know more about the world!

And some of these things are never explained. It's up to the reader to figure out what they mean, or might mean, from the limited clues they are given—or they might never learn any more than what's given.

Often, these last ones don't matter. For example, it doesn't matter what a hypervideo or a suspensor lamp actually is; it's enough to know that they are some form of video and light source, respectively.

Others matter quite a bit. For example, Flynne's brother's haptics are a key part of his character, but the reader doesn't really get a straightforward explanation of what they are—only contextual clues that the reader pieces together as the story continues.

Why do this?

Why drop terms and phrases that might confuse the reader or frustrate them? Here are a few good reasons:

1. It's immersive. Term-drops like this help the reader feel like they are stepping into another world. Conversely, if you stop to explain every little thing, it can pull the reader out of the story.
2. Sci-fi/fantasy readers expect it. This kind of mini-mystery—piecing together the shape of the novel's world—is one of the things genre fans love about speculative fiction.
3. It streamlines the narrative. It keeps the action moving and alleviates the need for the dreaded infodump.

Using abeyance requires a balance, but it's an important tool that every speculative fiction writer should be aware of.

Won't this frustrate readers?

So, I'll be the first to admit that some readers really don't like this kind of in-world term-dumping. When I was writing "Pawn's Gambit," one critiquer offered to send me a book written entirely in the Scottish dialect because "You deserve it past [sic] the headache I got from reading your short story."

You can't please everybody.

But you also don't have to. The other twelve critiquers who read the same story loved it (as did Beneath Ceaseless Skies), and my novel set in the same world—with all the same slang and obfuscated dialect—got me an agent. So long as the reader can understand what's happening, they don't need to understand every bit of in-world jargon. In fact, a lot of readers will enjoy it.

Finding a Balance

It's difficult to figure out how much is too much when requiring abeyance of your readers. Finding the right balance is an art, and you have to make mistakes to figure out what works. Here are some tips to do that:

1. Understand your audience. Sci-fi/fantasy readers are generally more tolerant of abeyance, but even within the genre, every reader is different. Read books like yours and pay attention to how much they use abeyance in their own writing to get a feel for it.
2. Employ beta readers. I cannot stress enough how helpful beta readers are for writing a novel. They're kind of like a focus group for the things you are unsure of. Every writer needs some.
3. Hire an editor. I mean, obviously I would say that, but you know, only hire one if you really need them.

Even with beta readers and editors, you want to find those who know your genre or are part of your intended audience. A professional editor who doesn't read much sci-fi might push you to include more infodumps than a sci-fi editor would, for example.

Lastly, trust yourself. Yes, it's hard to read your own work with fresh eyes, but you are the only person who knows what you're trying to do. Listen to the feedback you get, but listen to yourself too.

I mean, you are writing what you want to read, right?

Prequels, Can They Ever Be Good?

The year was 1999. My generation hadn't had a new Star Wars movie in sixteen years. We believed the series was done. Over. The trilogy had been groundbreaking, but it was in the past never to be revisited. Then, George Lucas announced the release of The Phantom Menace.

It is difficult to convey to my Gen Z kids how big a deal this was, how over-the-top excited we all were to walk into that theater to see the first new Star Wars movie in sixteen years...

...and how thoroughly disappointed we were walking out.

I did not enjoy The Phantom Menace. A lot of us didn't, and this experience cemented my skepticism toward movie releases for decades.

It's pretty easy to find examples of prequel let-downs. The Star Wars prequel trilogy. The Scorpion King. The Grindelwald movies. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. X-Men Origins: Wolverine.* It happens so often that it raises the question: Is it possible for a prequel to be good?

* And I apologize if you love any of these examples I chose. Although you might be in the minority, I love that these bring you joy anyway. Don't let me or anyone steal that from you.

My answer—informed as it was by my teenage Star Wars disillusionment—used to be no, of course not, prequels, by definition, are a bad idea. But as more counterexamples appear, I'm beginning to change my mind. What makes prequels bad is what makes any movie bad (e.g., when it's a blatant cash grab) but they can be done well.

I think a good prequel requires three things:

• An intriguing question
• A story that stands on its own
• Characters who grow

Let's take a look.

An Intriguing Question

For a prequel to be interesting, it has to promise an answer that fans of the original actually want. Why does Maleficent hate the king and queen so much? How did Mike and Sully become friends? How did Vito Corleone become so powerful?

An intriguing question isn't enough to make a prequel good, but it's a necessary start. If the fans don't care about the mystery that connects the prequel to the original, then it's hard to care about the prequel at all.

Also...

The question can't be dumb. We don't care how Han swindled the Falcon from Lando or what Obi-Wan was doing in his cave while Luke grew up. We don't need to see how the wizard came to Oz or learn why Cruella de Vil wants to skin puppies. The originals give us enough information that we can fill these gaps in our head. The questions might be interesting, but they're not worth making a whole new story about.

The answer can't be dumb. Han Solo's name can just be his name; it doesn't have to be a thing. And God help me but the mystery of the Force was so much cooler without a scientific explanation. If you're going to use a prequel to answer some outstanding mystery, your answer has got to be cooler than any fan theory out there (spoiler: that's very hard to do).

A Story That Stands on its Own

If the goal of your prequel is solely to explain where the protagonist got all her character quirks, then it might not be a story worth telling. If you're going to write a whole novel (or make a whole movie) out of an origin story, that story should be just as compelling to a newcomer as it is to the fans.

How to do that is the same as telling any story: give the protagonist goals and motivations, obstacles, stakes, difficult choices... all the things that go into telling any story.

Do not just walk us through the protagonist's upbringing as they pick up each piece of their iconic outfit.

Characters Who Grow

This is part of telling a standalone story, but it's important enough that it demands its own section. In a prequel, your fans already know how or where the protagonist ends up. We know Elphaba becomes the wicked witch. We know Cassian ends up a jaded pilot for the Rebel Alliance. We know Obi-Wan ends up an old hermit in a cave on Tatooine. What we don't know is how they got there.

This can be great (an intriguing mystery even!) if your protagonist starts off in an unexpected place—Elphaba as a misunderstood sorceress with a heart of gold or Cassian as a down-on-his-luck orphan who wants nothing to do with the rebellion against the Empire.

It works less well if your protagonist starts in the exact same place, physically and developmentally, as they finish. The end of Revenge of the Sith had already placed Obi-Wan on Tatooine. He had already learned to keep his head down, just wanting to keep Luke and his family out of trouble from the Empire—the same place and with the same goals and motivation he had at the beginning of A New Hope.

This makes it very hard to care about his actions in the Obi-Wan Kenobi miniseries. He's already where we know he's going to end up! There's nothing he can learn (that wouldn't undercut the action of the original movies)! He doesn't really grow, so there's no compelling reason to watch.

Ensuring that your characters grow and change in the prequel can prevent this.

What a Good Prequel Can Do for You

Done well, a good prequel can be a joy to fans of the original while also fully entertaining the uninitiated. It can give your audience those dopamine hits of fan service while still delivering a new, fantastic story.

A good prequel can also make the original better—adding depth or new perspective to an old, familiar story. It can create new fans and make existing ones want to revisit that world again.

I'm still wary about prequels. More often than not, the backstories in the audience's heads are cooler than the one you can give them. But there are ways to do it well, to expand the world of your story and tell a new story that's worth telling.

You just need to care about it and put in the work.