World Building the Right Way

After my post yesterday, I didn't want anyone to think that I was against the concept of world building. Far from it, actually. Having a fully realized world is a big part of fantasy. A good world is a character itself, one that the reader wants to get to know.

The bigger question is how much world building is enough? For me, the dividing line is the story. If the world that your characters are living in starts seriously getting in the way with the story you want to tell, there's a problem. Either your story should change, or the world should. Both approaches are valid, but both come with a warning.

Let's say you've done a huge amount of world building, and it all hangs together as a huge, coherent, historical whole. Well, great. Are your readers going to feel the same way? They only see this world through your characters, and perhaps through your narrative voice. They follow those characters to find out what happens to them. So if suddenly, the thread of your narrative is broken because of some esoteric fact about the way your world is built, it feels unjustified. It's a deux ex machina, no matter how real that world, and its rules, seem to you.

You can do it, but it will mean a thorough reworking of what you've done up to that point to justify the plot going in that direction. That's something that Tolkien did very well. For him, the world came first, and the story came second. When the story conflicted with the world, he adjusted the story. But Tolkien did it right: every action his characters took felt justified because by the time it happened, we knew the world well enough to believe it.

On the other side of the spectrum is someone who does little to no world building. I think of Terry Goodkind as an example of this. The Sword of Truth simply doesn't feel like it's set in a real place. Each place met along the characters' journey feels like an obstacle put there specifically to make the next section of plot happen. I think savvy readers pick up on this too, and it feels just as unjustified. It breaks the illusion of a real place, and turns it into the creator tormenting his created.

I believe that Robert Jordan is a good model for world building. Before he started The Wheel of Time, he had a sketch of the personality and culture of the many nations in his novels. As the characters arrived in that national, he developed those cultures, made them whole and fully realized places.

Tolkien had the advantage of writing his entire trilogy in advance of publication. If he wanted to go back and change things to make it work, he could. Jordan did not have that option. He had to make sure that the first book, and each subsequent book, could adequately set up anything he wanted to do elsewhere in his world. Tolkien's approach would not work here. Goodkind's approach would be the easy way out. Jordan took the middle road, the harder road, and to me, the more rewarding road.

In the case of Bryony's Market, I did only a small amount of world building at the beginning of the story, because the story was small. Initial chapters take place only within the walls of the market itself. As it became natural for the characters to make references to the world outside, they did, and I sketched out where these places were, and what they were like. Whether my characters ever visit those places or not is irrelevant; those notes form the backbone of my world building.

But that doesn't mean I have to develop an entire history of each of these places. When it becomes important that those places have a history, I'll give them one. Until then, they are only important insofar as I know they're there and how they affect my characters.

I think about it this way. Let's say you have your eyes closed. You stretch out your hand and touch a smooth hard surface. You automatically assume that there is a smooth, hard obstacle there. If it doesn't move, you decide it has weight and substance. It is a thing.

You open your eyes and discover that the "surface" is really just a handprint, placed exactly where your hand went. But you believed something was there, because that's all you touched.

Story is like that too. World building means knowing where the boundaries are, what they feel like. It means knowing what the results will be when your character interacts with the world. If the story causes the character to explore that boundary in greater detail, then create it. But if you only introduced elements of your world when they make sense for your plot, you might discover that your characters had been walking through places that should have been walls all along.