Adam Heine's Blog, page 2

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 startedHow to get organizedOften, 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: 

To help you understand your world enough to start writingTo give you extra details to draw from when you need themWe'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.

Finding What Works for You

Hey, look! A post!

Let's talk a bit about online presence—how writers and other creatives are told (or expected) to have one whether they like it or not. You gotta be on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and blogging (well, maybe not blogging anymore, but I will! Sometimes! Screw you, conventional wisdom!).

So the two of you who pay attention know that I've been streaming on Sunday nights for *checks calendar* about a year now. I started because it looked like fun, because I thought it would b...

Editing Tip: Consistency, Consistency, Consistency

I know it's been a while. I've been ridiculously busy, but as promised, here's a quick editing tip on something I always wished I had known and now I do.

So, I'm a very meticulous human being (most of the time). I like precision, accuracy, and the difference between the two. I like knowing the right way to do things, and I very much like doing things that way.

Which is why the English language drives me absolutely nutty.

One space after a period or two? Leaped or leapt? Jesus' or Jesus's? God da...

March Update

I've got a writing tips post for you next week, but here's where things stand with me now:
I'm writing dialogue for a game I can't announce yet (but will as soon as I'm allowed). There should be a reveal trailer soon, though I don't expect the actual game to be done for several months or more.I'm writing a gamebook-as-mobile-app (I'm doing the writing and choice design; the publisher is doing the systems design and actual functionality). So far, I've turned in three chapters out of ten. I hope...

Brief Work Notice

My last, large editing project has come in, and I have a new game design gig starting on Monday. Consequently, I will (probably) be too busy to post here until the editing project is done sometime in March. You know, for the two of you who care about such things.


When I do post, I have some writing/editing tips for you—things I always wish I had known and now I do.

Books I Loved in 2017

Late, I know, but meh. Here were some books I read and enjoyed in 2017. As with my games post, I'm mostly leaning toward books you are, perhaps, less likely to have heard of.


HAMMERS ON BONE by Cassandra Khaw

John Persons is a private investigator hired by a ten-year-old to kill the kid's stepdad. But he finds that something much worse is wrong with the stepdad . . . and the town. Fortunately, John Persons is a bit more than a, uh, person, and therefore qualified to handle creepy night horrors....

On Being Late to the Party (and a Quick Update)

So far, my months of too much work are going well. I've finished editing one novel and one novella, and the other projects have been sufficiently late in coming that I've had time to do so. I guess I made a good decision saying yes to too much!

Also, the gamebook is definitely going to be a thing now (meaning I've signed a contract). It's going to be several months coming, but it will come. So that's something to look forward to.

The other day, I had a mini-rant on Twitter about being late to t...

When Things Fall Through

I got some hard news this week. The editor who was looking at Sea of Souls decided to pass. I still have a lot of good things going on, but this one just . . .


So that was a hard day. But to my surprise, it was only a day. Maybe it's because I still have other things on the horizon or because I've been focusing on being thankful and redefining success, but this loss didn't kill me like it would have years ago—maybe even a year ago.

When I lost the Nexon gig last summer, I scrambl...