World building: an aside

My past two posts have been about world building for a story. It can be a daunting topic. I wanted to take a pause in looking at the minutia and chat a little about how much is needed to get started.

How much do I need?

Building a world is a daunting task. Figuring out every linkage and relationship is a lot of work for background that may never make it into the page of a story. Think about the volumes Tolkien wrote that were never published during his lifetime. This background material was critical to creating a rich and engaging world for his characters to explore, but was it all necessary?

Only you can make that determination. I like to think that the thought an author puts into their world comes out some way in their writing. I personally like to iterate on ideas and relationships. My latest novel started with a story that ended up being in the middle of the book. It did however set the stage for the world I needed to populate and incorporate into the tale. As the story progressed, I had to write back-story and then answer the critical “so what” questions on why this background mattered to my characters. This gets me to my next point.

When do I need it?

You need it as soon as it fosters a reaction in your characters. Maybe you need something to guide their behavior. Maybe you want something from the past to be a hook into a character’s actions. Perhaps you need a historical or cultural reason for things to exist the way they are in your story. The point is, you won’t know what you need until the story tells you so.

This court of thinking makes it very easy to say “I don’t need a lot of world building upfront.” Depending on your story, that may be the right answer. However, it can also lead you into corners you can’t write your way out of.

In Cosimo, I ran into such a situation. I wanted to have the empire have a technology base while the rest of the planet did not. Why would this situation arise? That led me to writing a back-story of their ancestors fleeing Earth and coming to their new world. Why did they flee? That became part of the back story and in-turn created the rationale for why many of the travelers turned away from technology. I then had to re-work parts of the story to remain consistent with that history.

Five Why’s

Due to this experience, which slowed down my writing the tale I wanted to tell, I suggest you start with some high-level world building. There is a trouble-shooting technique called Five Why’s that can help you explore the cause-and-effect relationships in your story. Simply put, when a story states a belief or cultural reference, ask yourself “why” they believe that? Even just listing these out briefly will give you a good start on a consistent world for your characters to populate.

Let me share a brief example, again from Cosimo. The colonists of the world are split into two broad cultures; the Empire and everyone else:

Why? – because only the empire maintained a technology base on landing.Why? – because many colonists viewed technology as a source of evil/reason for fleeing Earth.Why? – Because the unregulated rise of General AI and associated technologies forced them to flee earth.Why? – Two competing AI forces realized humans were a controllable variable in their instructions to protect the planet; humans would prevent them from achieving their set goals.Why? – Humans would try and shut them down once they realized the AIs were controlling them to be more docile and regulated.

The final “why’s” of this chain of thinking became foundational to the culture of the story, even if I did not buildout a cosmology and mythology for my world before writing word one.

Follow me on Amazon, GoodReads, or Facebook to get information about upcoming book releases.