 Fantasy: April 03, 2013 Issue [#5602] |
  Fantasy
This week: World Domination Edited by: Satuawany  
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When you introduce details about your world, make sure you're not doing it just to show off your world. Dominate your world, and make sure what comes out in the writing enhances the story.
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Spend the time you need to spend traveling the world(s) you create, and the urge to share all of it can be overwhelming. It’s as if the world is trying to dominate things and, for most stories, that’s going to make to pace uncomfortably slow.
Just because your created world has a ton of fascinating details doesn't mean all those details belong in the actual story.
Let’s say there’s an item on your world called a thinnabob. (Bear with me, here.) Now, one of your characters has a thinnabob. We see her use it to talk to a friend in some other location. Step one is to show it to us, preferably as she uses and interacts with it.
She pulls out a metal rod and strokes the thin wire that spirals from one end of it to the other. Closing her fingers around it, she presses an indentation in the metal, just below the crystal at its tip. A blue glow dots the crystal’s center, much like the iris of an eye. She whispers her friend’s name over the thinnabob.
“We should be there in time for supper tomorrow night,” she says into the item. The blue glow expands with each word, until it almost fills the crystal's interior.
When she points the wand toward the sky, a streak of blue light shoots away from the thinnabob, arcing over the trees in the direction of her friend’s location.
And that’s it, for this scene. We have a hint that the crystal can only “hold” so long a message, because of the way the blue glow grew, but this isn’t the place to lecture us about it. Or even confirm it. Let us wonder, and confirm it later when she or someone else surpasses a thinnabob’s capacity and has to send two or three consecutive messages.
A little mystery is the spice of any relationship, and is especially necessary in the relationship between writer and reader. That’s a minor thing, though. (Oh, but it’s always the little things, isn’t it? Yes, it is.)
A bigger problem comes when a writer gives a lecture on unnecessary history and details. For instance, as the writer, you know what kind of metal the rod’s made of, what sort of wire is wound around it, and what country specializes in enchanting crystals to record and send messages. You know if the friend has to have a thinnabob of his own to receive the message she just sent, or if the message curls itself into his ear, or dashes into some kind of receiving device. If you spill all of that out to us, when it doesn’t have anything to do with what’s happening, the story stops while you drown us in exposition.
We don’t need to know what country the crystal came from, and won’t unless that becomes important to the story, in any way. “Any way” does, indeed, include adding a sense of the world around the characters, but I hope you can see the example scene isn’t the place for that.
We don’t need to know the steps from mining the crystal to refining it to enchanting it. We don’t need to know that the sun has to be at a certain angle in the sky, which means they can only be enchanted a few days out of every year. We don’t need to know that one set of mages are working on a system of enchanted mirrors that would make it possible to imbue message crystals year-round.
The only time we’d need to know any of that would be if the information became directly important to the story. For instance, if your character wound up helping a mage with those mirrors, then it’d be time to tell us about the angle of the sun being a restriction on production.
As for what happens after the message shoots away, we can see that later. Show her receiving a reply so we get to see things happening, which keeps the story moving. It doesn’t matter if the reply goes into her crystal, some other receiving device, or just whispers itself into her ear---to see her receiving that reply is to know how her message was received by her friend.
And if her friend's way of receiving messages is different than hers, great! That’s something interesting to find out when we get there and see him receive a message from someone else. Until then, we’re perfectly content as readers, thinking it must have worked the same way as the reply she received. When we find out it works some other way for him, that’s interesting. And surely I don’t have to tell you how important it is to keep a reader’s interest.
This was a focused example, but hopefully the presentation of it allows you to apply it to other instances. Turn it on its head and think it over. And every time you get to dumping information about your world into your story, stop yourself and make sure you’re not letting your world dominate you into to boasting about. It’s all about world domination.
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Feedback on my previous newsletter, "A World-Building Exercise" :
Tadpole1  writes:
Hi Satuawany,
I loved the article.
My tree had animated flashing colored lights like an artificial Christmas tree with LED tips, and the animal was a six-legged chameleon. The tree only flashed when an animal brushed against it. Cutting a small branch to use as a torch in a cave would not work because the leaf tips would only glow and twinkle if attached. Imagine the forest.
Great exercise.
Excellent, Tadpole! I'm glad you got some mileage out of the exercise.
Cynaemon writes:
Thanks, this was great fun. I get a chance to do a lot of "exercises" with pen-palling on a site called swapbot. It is always fun to pretend to be someone else in another time and place, and to really stay in character. Will use some of these suggestions.
That can be a useful exercise for some writers. I hope the one I suggested in the last newsletter turns out to be useful to you as well.
Seamus Leo  writes:
What a great exercise for new high school and college writers. We should implement this in our national English writing curriculum if you do not mind.
Thanks! I should tell my mother, the retired English teacher, you said this. I can hear her now: "What is this exercise you wrote about? It sounds awfully familiar." And then I'd get The Look. That is to say, the exercise is a warped offspring of a couple of the exercises she used to have my classmates and I do. (Thanks, Mom!)
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