New Worlds Theory Post: The Worldbuilding On-Ramp

[swan_tower]

In obedience to long-standing tradition, in a month with five Fridays, the New Worlds Patreon turns its attention to matters of theory and craft! This time, we're taking a look at the worldbuilding on-ramp -- which is to say, the vital questions of how much to explain at the start of your story, and how choosing the right entry point can ease the reader's way in. Comment over there!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/7LsNqj)

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

I'm reminded of something that Mary Doria Russell said about science fiction, that you should write it so your Aunt Mary could pick it up and immediately understand what's going on in it. That's one approach. It appeals to a lot of readers who enjoy SF but aren't dedicated to it, who read a very wide range of genres. They appreciate that on-ramp.

The other approach is to dump readers into the story, usually in media res, with NO explanation, just as if they had crash-landed on an alien planet with little or no intel. It appeals to utter nerds who have read thousands of SF books and want something new and surprising. The on-ramp bores them.

The same spectrum applies to worldbuilding. You can have a very familiar setup that is easy to grasp immediately, which is an asset if you wish to focus on plot or characterization, or even the less-physical aspects of worldbuilding such as religion or politics. On the far end, you can devise elaborate geographies, including things that look nothing like a planet or even a plane. Your world could be a giant tree, or turtle, or seashell, or whatever else you dream up. This is often lots of fun to design, and appeals to readers who have seen numerous builds and would like something new. Or you could design anywhere in the middle of that spectrum.

I often use a familiar-ish setting when I need a fast setup and want to focus on the action or characters. Path of the Paladins and One God's Story of Mid-Life Crisis are both fairly standard fantasy settings. But if I'm sitting down to worldbuild for its own sake, or craft something new from scratch, then I lean the other way. Even if it's just a particular system -- like politics in The Ocracies or soulmarks in Eloquent Souls -- I put some real thought into building that part. If I'm writing the end of the world again, like Daughters of the Apocalypse, I try to come up with one I haven't done before and then work through the mechanics of it. Often a setting requires a bunch of things to be built, like A Conflagration of Dragons. Occasionally it even happens by accident, like the bus-sized crocodiles that I totally did not put into Peculiar Obligations on purpose. Back when Torn World was running, I designed several whole ecosystems including the sea monsters, an avian one, and a lichen one.

I enjoy worldbuilding as a hobby, and I find that it can have a big impact on the type of stories I tell. I like the whole spectrum. But my deepest love is for the far-out shit I've never seen before.