Third of three posts recreating workshops you may have missed at Un-Con 2019.
What shaped you into the person you are today? Your experiences, certainly, but I’m talking about your foundation, the bedrock of who you are. Certain things about you are fundamental and unchanging. You are rooted in influences that you didn’t choose. That foundation comes from factors beyond your control, that are bigger than you, and that you probably don’t question. Probably you don’t want to. You simply are who you are.
Why? Three factors shape us more than any others: family, faith and where we come from. Family sets our view of ourselves, our way of operating, our limits and expectations for ourselves. Faith is what we believe, not only about cosmology but about people, society, civilization and the nature of things in general. Place, though, is the least understood and, in manuscripts, the least utilized of our shaping influences.
Science fiction and fantasy writers have a keen understanding of how different worlds shape different assumptions, limits and behavior. When you live in a world with different rules, you’re a different person. But here’s the thing, we all in our everyday realities come from different worlds: different hometowns, different regions, different histories, different educations, different value sets. We are products of our places.
You can hear those differences in the ways we talk about ourselves. In my family we used to… Mama always told me… Where I come from, the way things worked was… There are differences with every neighborhood, town hall, school, sports team, police force, doctor’s office, racial group, social strata, sense of history, local heroes, legendary villains, bogeymen, and more.
Those differences put boundaries around characters’ thinking, limit what they can do or cause them to rebel. They are facts and forces, and for each one there can be a character who represents that dimension of place. Protagonists, too, are subject to the influences of where they’re from and where they find themselves. Building the world of your story, then, can both enrich it and make it more realistic. Place can become a character.
So, how is that done? SFF writers start with what is different in their worlds and then work out the logical consequences. Change one thing about landscape, climate, civilization, history or living beings and there will be cascading effects. SFF readers love that speculation and the immersive experience it creates. Technology and magic are frequently the basis for different SFF worlds, but there are many other ways to make a world particular and unique.
Even if the world of your story is our everyday “ordinary” world, start with these questions: In the world of your story, what is the one thing that is the most unlike anywhere else? What difference would tourists notice the most? How does that difference (positively) condition or (negatively) constrain your protagonist?
More ideas:
In the world of your story, what is socially acceptable and what is not? What custom do people keep? What are standard greetings? What is considered good manners? How are deference and respect shown? What in this place is uniquely honorable—or dishonorable? Who is shunned simply for how they behave?
In the community of your story, who rules? What legislated laws are different? What are iron-clad social rules and unwritten laws? How are those enforced? How are violators punished? Who are the police of conformity and who rebels? Name the social strata of your story world. Who moves up, but must be beaten down? Who falls, and is shunned? Who transcends their class, conforms too much, slavishly plays by the rules? Who doesn’t give a shit?
On which rung of the ladder does your protagonist belong? Whom does your protagonist respect? Whom does your protagonist disrespect? How does your protagonist live up to, or rebel against, social expectations? What’s at stake? What’s the cost of conformity—or disobedience? What’s the collateral damage?
What is the best known, most remembered piece of local history? Who is a local hero? Who is honored? Who is legendary? What historic event stirs pride? What are local holidays, memorials, statues, symbols, flags? What is the secret history? What past injustice is not spoken about? What group is oppressed, and by whom? What past injustice or genocide is excused, dismissed or denied by those in power? Who are legendary outlaws and what do they stand for? How does your protagonist identify? How will that change?
What do people in this place believe? About what do they disagree? What are the sects, factions, splinter groups, breakaways? Where does your protagonist belong in that range? Where does your protagonist wind up at the end of the story?
In religion, chart differences in doctrines, rituals, holidays, text, prayer, music, saints, worship style. What is required of believers? What is proscribed? Who obeys? Who cheats? What is the most obvious hypocrisy? What is the triune nature of the divine (e.g., Father, Son, Holy Spirit)? What is the hierarchy of the clergy? What comforts or chafes your protagonist, or both? What’s wrong with this religion?
Who is rich? Who is poor? What’s the big industry? Who’s the big employer? What are the complaints of labor? What do workers demand but not get? What jobs are open to which groups? How is discrimination masked? How is the economy rigged? What limits mobility? How are tax laws, credit worthiness, zoning exceptions, scholarship grants and more structured to benefit the haves and keep down the have nots? Why should there be a revolution? What injustice bothers your protagonist the most?
What’s the climate in your story world? What’s the greatest plague: flood, fire, drought, hurricane, tornado, earthquake? What are the seasons? What’s unique about sunshine, rain, snow, winds? How has the climate shaped this world’s way of life, buildings, clothing, livelihoods, folk wisdom? What’s the weather event everyone remembers? What disaster is overdue? Bring it on!
As you can see, your story world can have a big influence on your protagonist and on the story itself. But for that to happen, you have to build it.
What’s different in the world of your WIP, and what effect does it have on your protagonist and the story itself?
Wish you could buy this author a cup of joe?
Now, thanks to tinyCoffee and PayPal, you can!
About Donald Maass
Donald Maass (he/him) is president of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. He has written several highly acclaimed craft books for novelists including The Breakout Novelist, The Fire in Fiction, Writing the Breakout Novel and The Career Novelist.
Thanks for this extremely timely post, Donald! As always, the questions are great food for thought. As my WIP is set on a world almost, but not exactly like, ours, it is important for me to show the differences and similarities. Generally I describe the similar things like I would if they were on our world. So a metro train is a metro train and a phone is a phone. No special description (if I do not need to emphasise anything about it). The most important differences are geography (only two continents), history (a big war that turned society upside down) and world-order/society (different hierarchies, goals etc.). These of course shape my protagonist, especially as he needs to overcome them. Some of it I explain via discussions with outsiders who do not understand the system (as they are living on the other continent). That way my protagonist also learns to question what he thinks is “normal”. For me the tricky thing is on how much difference to put into this world compared to ours, and how much of the background the reader needs to know (what is important, what is just a cute detail I came up with that holds not relevance to the story).
That’s a primary worldbuilding challenge: what to include? What’s important? What’s necessary for the reader to know? I’d say that any character action that would not be done (or said) the same way in our world is a candidate for explanation, though not all such things are of equal importance.
The ER is the primary world of my WIP. The “Crash Room” is the specialized arena of glistening instruments, complex technology and fevered effort where my protagonist and his team battle to save the most critical – those for whom every second counts.
Many are saved but not all battles are won.
Oftentimes my character has to recognize no more can be done and declare “time of death”. My character stands with his coworkers in what is often a blood-spattered and equipment littered scene with the body of someone whose death brings loss and pain.
In this setting those who fought for the lost life must seek comfort in knowing they tried as best they could,
When a domestic terrorist falsely gains entry to the Crash Room during a resuscitation, he announces his presence by executing a security person with a gunshot to the head. That is the start.
Their world is blown off its axis.
Another great post.. Thank you.
A different world indeed! The tension between terrorist and doctors sounds fabulous. Worlds collide.
Thank you, Don. A great post and one that is especially relevant to me as my novel is in its final edit. Happily, I was able to tick off more than a few boxes as I read your list of prompts.
Based on a true historic disaster that destroyed an artists community and changed art history forever. The mystical island of a woman’s retreat and the unique metaphysical laws governing the afterlife of a unique spirit with unfinished business, defines and confines the physical, mental, and elemental boundaries of the story, where a place and an illness are both haven and prison.
Aurelia, a troubled high school girl who believes her eventual fate will be succumbing to the curse of dementia that runs in her family, is confronted by the dispirited spirit of a girl in a painting who bargains her release.
As a result, Aurelia runs away and becomes a recluse to save herself and those she loves the most. Fifty years on, still shadowed by the ghost, Aurelia seeks peace in her remaining years by retiring to an extraordinary island. But once there, odd events convince her that the confrontation when she was seventeen was more of an abduction and that she’s been manipulated by lies, commandeered into resolving the mysteries and trauma of the distant past, and now she’s deep into a pact she regrets that binds her to the metaphysical laws ruling reincarnation, comeuppance, and atonement.
As Aurelia is slowly absorbed into a painting one memory at a time it becomes obvious that immortality is even more life-threatening than death. At the eleventh hour Aurelia summons an unlikely muse and although rescue appears unlikely there’s a ghost of a chance she’ll remember the way home.
A mysterious island! A mysterious painting! Ghosts and immortality! A world of different rules. Fantastic.
Hey Don–Lots to consider here, even for those of us writing SFF. I always knew there was a power imbalance in Dania. But–credit where credit is due–it was you who once prodded me to consider why it existed. In other words, how the haves keep themselves and the have-nots in their respective places.
As James Carville famously said in 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid.” For me it starts with the wool economy. But I have to continue to remember Maass and Carville lessons as my world broadens beyond grazing tenancy and fixed shearing pricing. And that every economic cost and benefit has an emotional angle–one that’s differs for each set of characters.
I really enjoyed the session at UnCon, but this was a terrific booster shot. Thanks for today, and for the great lessons that brung me here.
Every world is out of balance in some way. People are never equal. Politics keeps it that way.
Dania is such a place and Vahldan is a hero to bring change…that is, if he can transcend his flaws…
Thanks for another timely post Don.
One question I’ve been asking in the rewrite of my WIP is: how are children taught difficult subjects and at what age?
My kids are hitting algebra and geometry much sooner than I remember doing. Sometimes I think it’s we adults who need the education.
Writing is the only thing I’ve ever tried that gets more difficult the more I learn. Thick clouds gather around me and the way forward, the way to write seamlessly and invisibly gets murkier and murkier.
Thank goodness we have a guide through it all. Thank you.
There’s always more to learn about writing fiction, that’s one of the great things about it. Never despair, just enjoy the challenge. I mean, why else bother with something so complex?
Place is central to my work. Place has created my characters, their challenges. Even if you move thousands of miles away, place is part of the workings of your brain, your decisions. We are always locked in the struggle of loving or rejecting our origin place, its faults, its glories. Read great authors and place will spring from the page in moments. It colors our sensibilities.
I grew up in suburban Connecticut, a place that I felt lacked any character whatsoever. That of course is untrue, it’s just taken me a while to get over my sense of suffocation and see it as a unique world.
Yes, just ask John Cheever!
Hi Don,
One of the things I like about this approach is that it provides a model for how I can make up my own WIP-specific questions and then answer them myself to find out what I need to know.
I’ve always done this, maybe due to my experience as a journalist, but I think my skill at it has greatly improved since I attended these sessions at Un-Con.
I’m untangling a plot point at the midpoint of my second draft. Last night I jotted down:
– What did O, Vl and F decide to do about L after Vx told them truth about her?
– What does Vx know about what they decided?
– What does Vx tell S?
– What does Vx *not* tell S?
– Does she believe him?
– What do O, Vl and F intend to do about G’s dangerous plan to (spoiler deleted)?
– How do O, Vl and F find out what G did to L and C?
– What is S going to do about all this?
– What does all this mean for S?
Marcie
(O + V1 + F) + (S – Vx) x (Gx2) = complicated! Place can be another factor in the story math, too.
Indeed. Not asking “where?” soon enough has tangled me up more than once when I later realized one character had to be in two places at the same time and didn’t have that particular super power.
A lot to think about, as always.
Between religion, rules, secret histories, and culture, I can see how being more aware of world-building will help me polish up my thrillers.
Thank you!
Thrillers most definitely benefit from worldbuilding, I agree.
Don, I am reading Atwood’s “The Testaments” now, having read “Handmaid’s Tale” many years back. Her constructing of that cruel, misogynistic world—with various characters recounting their place in it—is precise and measured, which makes it all the more sinister.
There are so many stifling regulations, status levels and posturings in Gilead; the subtle ways that behaviors are constrained and reinforced by those rules is a great model for world-building. Thanks for the dandy post!
Hi Don,
A significant part of my Wip takes place in three different convents or hospitals. I smiled when I saw your reference to Father, Son and Holy Ghost. They appear on my first page! I think the inner workings of convents are unfamiliar to many so I’ve tried to use enough detail to make it come alive but not so much as to distract. Thanks for what you do.
ooooh, good one. And I loved the previous piece – I wrote a long comment, but was a little too late I think to get your response. This one comes on the heels of my finishing reading Middlesex! Talk about place and time and timely topic! Even though it is 18 years ago that it won the Pulitzer Prize. My WIP is after the disappeared in Buenos Aires, and goes from Hollywood to Machu Pichu. The arc is a spiritual coming of age.