On Writing and Worldbuilding, Volume I

by Timothy Hickson

It can be tempting to bring in as many intriguing elements of your story as you can, but picking one central element for that opening line allows the author to narrow the reader’s focus onto something that makes your story stand out.

opening to the 2007 Doctor Who episode, Doomsday, where Rose Tyler says, “This is the story of how I died.”

That opening line then feels more like clickbait: READ THIS BOOK TO FIND OUT HOW SHE DIED.

Tone

“The best thing you can do for your book is to make sure the first chapter adequately represents the tone of the rest of the chapters, so the book as a whole seems cohesive.”

This is partly why in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first chapter (which is more of a prologue, as discussed in Part I) skips the traumatic scene of depicting the death of Harry’s parents and goes straight to the celebrations of Voldemort’s fall and the whimsical Dumbledore and the boisterous Hagrid. It’s more consistent with the tone of the rest of the story.

It can be built in any number of ways, including:

Imagery: focusing on how the wind and rain is tearing the leaves off trees establishes a pessimistic tone, while focusing on how a single beautiful flower survives the storm establishes an optimistic tone.

Stakes of the opening problem: in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s King Lear, the problem Cordelia faces is the need to prove how much she loves her father, the king.

Fundamentally, tone is less about what happens and more about how you say it. It is about the feelings you invoke in the reader with imagery, diction, characterisation, and emphasis.

The opening hook

Most of the time, the hook does one of two things: It causes the reader to ask a question that they wish to know more about. It sets up a controversial statement that they may or may not agree with.

not every first chapter needs an inciting incident.

They do, however, need a hook to operate as an enticing first chapter.

Summary

Firstly, using the mini-three-act structure gives you the opportunity to introduce your setting and characters in interesting ways as you show what kind of problems arise in your world and how your character approaches them.

Secondly, effective opening lines tend to be succinct and not superfluous. To do this, introduce only one central element of your story that makes it interesting: the conflict, the setting, the theme, or otherwise.

Thirdly, first chapters tend to work when their tone is consistent with the rest of the story.

Fourthly, the hook and inciting incident are two different story elements. A first chapter must have a hook.

PART III THE EXPOSITION PROBLEM

exposition is the contextual information required to understand the story.

This can be backstory of the characters, how your magic system works, how your antagonist rose to power, how the major pieces of technology in your science fiction world work, how your state is ruled by super-intelligent lemmings, how your city-state has an economy based on pumpkins, or almost anything else.

How do you communicate exposition? What information might you communicate? When might you communicate it?

How to communicate exposition: the perspective character

the Exposition Problem is that half the time, the information you are giving is something the reader does not know but all of the characters already do.

one of the most common ways to solve the Exposition Problem is to use an unknowledgeable perspective character.

There are consequences to that exposition being delivered.

Using an unknowledgeable perspective character who is personally affected by learning the exposition helps the reader care about this information.

One of the common lazier forms of the unknowledgeable perspective character is amnesia—where

Now, amnesia is not necessarily a bad plot device, but it is very often used with no other consequences throughout the story—it is used as a means to communicate how the magic system works, but it does not affect the characters’ interpersonal relationships in any meaningful way, such as how their girlfriend might feel when they realise their boyfriend does not remember them.

How to communicate exposition: narrative payoff

One way to circumvent this issue is to use the exposition as payoff in the narrative, by placing obstacles between it and the main character.

At its heart, every mystery is simply a character on a quest for exposition.

However, you might have already clued to the obvious problem with this strategy: this is a lot of set-up for mere exposition. Because of this, the narrative-payoff strategy primarily works for the most fundamental information to your story—that which is the unique premise of your novel, the first great twist, or the heart of the conflict. The ‘What is the Matrix?’ question, in that sense.

How to communicate exposition: the Pope in the Pool

Blake Snyder in Save The Cat, a great book for screenwriters, offers one solution: the Pope in the Pool. This is where otherwise dull information is delivered in the context of a shocking, dramatic, or humorous scene.

But let us break the Pope in the Pool technique down a little bit further into three categories: characterisation, conflict, and environmental exposition.

Characterisation

Giving a physical description of your character is difficult to make feel natural,

The only exposition given here is that which helps better explain the emotional state Harry is in, the setting, and how Harry was treated, with the exception of line

he constantly adds in little backstories to families, houses, and characters, but they work because they are always done in a way that reveals more about the character at hand.

Conflict

Using conflict to deliver exposition can bring out the personal beliefs of the characters, depending on who explains it. It also allows the writer to naturally introduce colloquial terminology used in the story, and how that character phrases the conflict allows the author to explore how different factions are related.

Environmental exposition

communicate exposition through your environmental descriptions.

Environmental exposition is also particularly effective in establishing worldbuilding elements that do not naturally lend themselves to dialogue between the characters.

Oftentimes, it is crucial in establishing a setting, tone, mood, or theme that would be jarring to explicitly state in the narrative.

What information might you communicate

while it may an important part of the worldbuilding, it is not an important element of the narrative conflict.

The question then becomes: what do we need to include?