How to Build a World

Hello, my friends. It feels great to be back to my usual routine. With this being the first post of the year, it seemed a good time to talk about world-building, and why it matters to novelists.

When I first heard the term, I thought it was specific to science fiction and fantasy. After all, I reasoned, if you set your story in the ‘real’ world, then you don’t need to create a world of your own. I later learned that the concept of world-building applies even to the most realistic of novels.

Think about your family. Once you are in your house together and the door closed, certain behaviours and patterns are accepted without question. When I was a child, the big black armchair in the corner was ‘daddy’s chair.” Sure, we could sit in it when he wasn’t home, but the minute he walked through the door, that seat was vacated for him. My dad was very old-fashioned, so he called all his daughters, ‘darling’, and on the rare occasions that he swore — ‘damn’ was about as bad as it got — he would apologise immediately. So many little customs that developed over the years, mostly without us even noticing. It was only when we went to friends’ houses that the differences caught us by surprise. This father swore incessantly, that husband not only beat his wife, but encouraged his sons to do so, too. This mother was always drunk, and that one smelled bad. Some houses were spotless, and others were filthy.

Your home is your world. Especially when you’re a child and have little say in how things are done. Whether we look back on those years with happiness or anger, they remain a part of who we are.

All families have their own internal rules. Sorry, Mr Tolstoy, but all happy families are not alike. The personalities, ages, finances, and geography will impact each individual and how they impact one another. I would add, too, that it’s perfectly possible to be miserable in an otherwise happy family.

When you start writing, you seldom think about the world in which your characters live, unless your story is set in another universe or a different planet. But if you are writing about a specific time and place here on planet Earth, you may not give the matter much thought. However, even stories set in the ‘real’ world have to follow certain rules.

Suppose you are writing a story set in 1972 in the US. Your hero is 19 and he has nothing on his mind but girls, cars, music, and girls. You write your whole story about this young man and you figure you did a good job with it. But, whoops, what about that whopping great elephant filing his nails in the corner? The one called Viet Nam. In that time, in that place, no man of that age would be able to ignore the draft and the odds of being called up. Now, you could write the story, still focusing on that young man, and not mention the events of South-East Asia. But maybe the young man is reckless and it’s not till the end, when he has to leave his home and join the army that we understand his behaviour.

The point is we all live in the larger world, just as much as we do in our intimate home-based world, and we cannot ignore the events happening outside our door. As I write historical mysteries, I always check what historical events are happening during the period in which my story is set. Not just the big events like death of Queen Victoria, but less obvious things, like the first motor-car related death, or setting up telephone lines around the country. For example, one of the threads that runs through my most recent book, Great Warrior, is the Second Boer War and the way it impacted people in England, even if they were non-combatants.

When you sit down to create the world in which your character lives, you need to think of all the components: the weather, the geography, the socio-economic status of the characters, their language and customs, and so on.

As you are writing, you need to keep the story consistent with that world, unless something happens to radically change the status quo. For instance, The Railway Children (1905) begins when the children’s father is arrested and they can no longer live in their comfortable house. They have to move to a cottage in Yorkshire and adjust to an entirely new world.

In an early, unpublished, novel that I wrote, I had a character who had been gifted with foresight and visions. However, when the story began, that gift had somehow vanished, and part of his problem was learning to adjust to his new ‘ordinariness’. What made his situation worse was that none of his friends or colleagues had ever experienced that gift, so they couldn’t understand his anguish.

What you can’t do, though, is make a change in the middle of the story and expect your readers to be all right with it. If an English family suddenly starts speaking with a French accent, we will wonder why. We will wonder why a poor family suddenly acts rich, or if a mansion turns into a hovel.

One of my favourite actors is Dirk Bogarde, but he made a film I cannot stand to watch, and it’s all because the world in which the story takes place is a mess. The Singer not the Song, as far as I can make out, concerns a bandit, Anacleto Comachi (Bogarde), who rules a small town with violence and corruption. One gets the sense that the town is in Mexico, but that, like many other details, is uncertain. It could easily be any South American town, or even somewhere in Spain. It doesn’t help that Bogarde’s character speaks with a clipped English accent. His antagonist, an Irish priest, is played by English actor John Mills (with a dreadful fake Irish accent that comes and goes). What’s worse is, at one part of the film, just as we’re accepted we’re in the late 1800s, a sports car appears.

I won’t go on, but you get the idea. If we don’t know where and when the story is set, it’s going to be very difficult to get on with it. Not surprisingly, The Singer not the Song bombed at the box office.

The one big rule about world-building is to keep it consistent. If something changes radically, you must explain it. Whether your story is set in a small Mexican town in 1950, or in a galaxy far, far away, create the appropriate world and stick with it, unless you explain the changes to your readers.

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