We’ve all heard that everything and everyone in the world is connected, and this is just as true in fiction as it is in real life. When creating a world, whether it’s fantasy or science fiction or paranormal, all the bits and pieces have to hold together and work together. All the spaces need to be filled in with the proper parts, and it all needs to mesh seamlessly or the made-up world will have a thoughtless, cardboard feel to it.
Contrary to what one might think, writing in a made-up world is not easier than writing in the real one. Hearing a writer say, “I love writing fantasy because you can just make everything up!” gets me cringing because anyone who can toss out that statement in a blithe, smiley-laden tone of type obviously hasn’t thought things through, and their story will probably end up set in a world which is a superficial collection of ill-fitting elements, most of which are likely to be off-the-shelf cliches, with huge gaps where the implications or ramifications of some earlier decision or creation clearly weren’t considered. No matter how gripping your plot is or how well-drawn the characters (and really, how well can you develop your characters if they sprang from a trainwreck of a setting?) the story as a whole can never be more than mediocre if the world it’s set in looks like it was made up on the fly by a writer who didn’t even know where her areas of weakness were.
Everything has to work, and work with everything else.
If the evil king who rules the land goes around every Sunday slaughtering peasants for sport, who’s doing the work as the working-class population dwindles? Who’s raising the crops and tending the animals and making the pots and chairs and horseshoes? For that matter, what’s preventing the peasants from high-tailing it out of there? If sticking around meant a good chance of being murdered by my own ruler, I personally would take my chances with any border guards, no matter how tough. They can’t surround the whole country — just ask the INS.
If a mediocre apprentice mage is cranking out magical cloaks (auto-heating!) and belts (protection from all animal bites, including mosquitos!) by the dozen as practice, then obviously magical items must be pretty darned easy to make. So why doesn’t everyone have one? Or several? Magic workings are part of the economy and if magic is common or easy then it has to have an impact on its society. And note that saying, “Well, all the mages promise to use their power only in time of Great Need” doesn’t hack it. Gandalf was sparing with his magic, but he was essentially an archangel; if your wizards are human then as a group they’ll include all the standard human weaknesses, including greed, selfishness, and the capacity for self-justification. Human nature is still human nature, even in a fantasy setting; if you’re going to change it, you need a very good reason and some bulletproof justification.
If vampires need to consume one adult person’s worth of blood per week to survive, that’s six quarts. You end up with a vampire who’s either killing someone every week (fifty-two murders per year) or leaving people alive by taking a pint at a time from twelve people per week (one quart = two pints) and spending a lot of time hunting/schmoozing. Even if your vampire is psychic and can make people forget they ever met him or her, they’re zapping the memories of 624 people per year. Either way, murder or mind-zapping, someone’s going to notice. I can see the headlines now, shrieking about some sort of new disease going around the city causing periods of memory loss, or speculating about a new kind of early-onset Altzheimer’s. If the writer wants the characters to have to deal with this sort of thing, then great. (Any vampire writers, feel free to grab the bunny.) And if they’re not zapping memories, than at least one of those 624 people is going to blab, no matter how charismatic or scary the vampire might be. If the writer just ignores all this, though, and the city is perfectly calm, business as usual, with no consequences for the marauding vampire, I’m going to be eyerolling pretty quickly.
And if the vampire turns someone, even if it’s only once per book, extrapolate that back for however many centuries or millenia vampires have existed, figure out about how many vampires there probably are in the world, and escalate the problem accordingly. Even the occasional Van Helsing with a satchel full of stakes isn’t going to be able to hold back that particular tide — how long before the human population dwindles to the point where the vampires are all going to starve to death?
This sort of economy of dwindling resources can be done and done well, and turned into an excellent story arc of its own. Jacqueline Lichtenberg wrote a series of SF books where the human race had mutated into two forms, one of which was a vampire-like predator who had to kill one of the other sort each month to survive. The predators started out as a minority population, but about halfway through the series (which covered centuries of future history) she addressed the problem of twelve deaths per year times a lengthening lifespan for the predators multiplied by an expanding predator population, and came up with what she called Zelerod’s Doom, named after the predator mathematician who ran the numbers and gave his people the extremely unwelcome news that Something Had To Be Done by a certain year or they were going to kill all the prey and then starve to death. It was a major plot point of the series and eventually forced a significant shift in the functioning of her society, with all the politics and wars and death and crises this sort of shift usually entails.
This is great worldbuilding, following the implications to their logical conclusion and then using that conclusion to tell an absorbing story. Note also that this sort of conflict would’ve rocked in a romance series — classic Romeo and Juliet stuff.
Not that this is the only way to do it. With some forethought and some time spent chasing down the implications of various aspects of your world, you can create a setting which is relatively stable, if you want to be able to put it in place and then not have to tinker with it over the course of your novel or series. But making sure it actually is stable, that all the parts mesh with each other without any noisy grinding of gears, does take planning and calculation. Considering aspects of society like the government and the economy and religion and the social order and the prevailing worldview of the people, and thinking about how they work together and how they might clash, can help a writer spot potential points of conflict or contradiction. If there’s magic or supernatural beings in the world, their impact needs to be considered. Even geography can be a key feature; the Vikings wouldn’t have gone viking if they’d lived in a rich, fertile land, while Japan wouldn’t have tried to conquer its neighbors if its islands had contained the coal and iron resources they needed to industrialize, and the Italian penninsula sticking out into the middle of the Mediterranean put it in a good position to control sea traffic across the Med for centuries.
Think about all the basic needs of the populace, food and shelter and other necessities, stability and security, trade and information and entertainment, and make sure your society provides these somehow. Any lacks can either be used to round out the story conflicts, or patched up and made to fit more smoothly, either one, but something needs to be done with them.
The fact is that creating a good fantasy or SF setting takes just as much work as researching a real-world historical setting. It’s just a different kind of work. Making up a system that functions, or several systems which function together, means understanding all those systems well enough to riff variations. Trying to make up a world without understanding what all the parts are and how they function is like a beginning music student picking up a trumpet and trying to play improv jazz — it doesn’t work, and the audience isn’t going to be terribly appreciative. You have to know how to follow the roads before you can start hacking your own path through the uncharted underbrush. Studying history and anthropology is a great place to begin, as is boning up on your sciences if you’re writing SF.
Worldbuilding can be a lot of fun, but you have to enjoy that kind of work, and doing the research required to build up a body of knowledge which will let you judge whether your basic concept is even viable. If the idea of all that groundwork is dismaying, then maybe you’d be better off with real-world settings where you can look things up. If popping the hood and learning how and why things work, and working out how different systems function and connect sounds like great fun, though, then chances are you’ll do a good job and enjoy the process. And your readers will appreciate the results.
I’m afraid that ‘I can make it all up’ is *exactly* how I feel about fantasy. (I have an advantage in having a degree in history/geography, so making things up comes easier to me.) I can have the tribes, customs, technology level and geography where I need them. And in turn, they are suggesting stories, and making them more vibrant.
But the other thing I like about invented world is that there are no preconceptions. It’s impossible to write about a historical conflict without readers taking either one or the other side, but I can have an ambiguous character, or a clash of two cultures, and nobody has a preformed opinion about them at all.
by Catja (green_knight) May 9th, 2008 at 8:34 amI do love worldbuilding to the level that you describe. Alongside the book, I’m writing an encyclopedia of all details of each world I encounter. Economy, religion, geographic and geologic features, natural history, biology and wildlife, weather patterns, social structure, food, entertainment, birth and death rates, and all the “whys” that come with each.
That for me is fun. I draw off a lot of history. One of my societies is based off of ancient Rome, for example.
I love world building, and I’m good at it. But you’re right, if someone doing worldbuilding doesn’t address the small things, then the world just doesn’t come together.
by Chessie May 9th, 2008 at 9:10 amOh, I think it’s easy.
Sure, It’s a lot of work, but it’s FUN and that’s what makes it easy.
Right now, I’m working on a Time Travel Romance which means a lot of historical research. That’s fun too. What isn’t fun is making sure all the little details are right while being a white-as-a-bleached-sheet American writing the story from a biracial American’s point of view inside England during World War II. There just isn’t a lot of resources for that! Thank goodness for Adelaide Hall. If it was Menelae instead of England, I could make up all the little details and figure out how they work together on my own time.
I’ve learned with any kind of historical writing, you have to absolutely love the research or it’ll kill you.
I do love it, but I love world-building on other planets just a little more. 
by Kimber An May 9th, 2008 at 9:17 amI LOVED this post. So fascinating.
I would also apply this thinking to the “real” world. Billionaire businessmen sleeping with their virgin secretaries WILL get sued and lose the respect of their coworkers and executive team.
CEO’s of successful companies ARE the Olympic athletes of the businessworld. They got to be CEO’s because they worked harder, loved the game more, and are more savvy than their competition. They don’t take or even want weekends off.
But that said, give me a good romp in an elevator without having to think about the cameras. Sometimes we simply want to read fantasy and fairy tales. We want to escape.
by Kimber Chin May 9th, 2008 at 9:17 am…how long before the human population dwindles to the point where the vampires are all going to starve to death?
Thank you. I have not been able to read a single Vamp Queen Commands Army Against Humanity story without thinking this.
Kimber Chin, oddly enough it’s easier for me to suspend disbelief in ‘real world’ stories than it is in fantasy.
by Robyn May 9th, 2008 at 9:36 amFantastic post! Thanks so much.
by Carolyn Jewel May 9th, 2008 at 10:32 amCatja — but you’re not “just” making it all up. With a history/geography degree, you already have the background knowledge necessary to do seat-of-the-pants worldbuilding and have the basic concepts fit together and make sense. And if you need to look something up, you know where to go and might even have some authors and experts in mind.
I agree about a fantasy world having the advantage of a lack of baggage. [nod] A well constructed fantasy world has just as little baggage as a badly thrown-together fantasy world, though, and I know which I’d prefer to read about.
Chessie — it seems to be the things a writer doesn’t know they don’t know that trip them. [nod] I enjoy worldbuilding too, though, and half the time my own problem is not putting too much of that information into the manuscript. [wry smile]
Kimber An — sure, that kind of easy is fine, where it’s “easy” because you’re enjoying the work.
It’s when a writer thinks that writing fantasy means you have to do so much less work that I wince, you know? The folks who think they can pull any combination of elements out of the air and tape them into the manuscript and don’t even know how awful it sounds. I have no issue with writers who think it’s easy because their reaction is “Woohoo, worldbuilding!” and a dash to the library. [grin]
Kimber Chin — thanks.
And yes, I agree that there are real-world settings which often get far less research than they need, definitely. [nod] I used to work for a government contractor, for example, and whenever I read a story set in a high-security environment, I get ready to grit my teeth at at least one or two really major stupidities. It’s just one of those things.
Sometimes we simply want to read fantasy and fairy tales. We want to escape.
True, but I think there are ways for a writer to acknowledge that they’re going over the top, you know? If the general tone is all hyper-realism and everyday grit, then using something like a fantasy elevator encounter, with no security camera consequences, clonks horribly. If the story in general feels more like a James Bond universe, though (movieverse, of course) then I’m more willing to buy the little fantasy touches because the whole thing feels more popcornish. I think what it comes down to, with degrees of realism, is the writer establishing early on for the readers just what general level of realism the story is based on, and then keeping consistent with that level throughout.
Robyn — you’re welcome.
Sometimes I think Stoker had it right, with his single vampire. At least he didn’t have to worry about predation demographics.
Carolyn — you’re very welcome, and I’m glad you enjoyed it.
Angie
by Angela Benedetti May 9th, 2008 at 12:12 pmOh, absolutely, Angela, the ‘world’ has to make sense. A writer can’t just make up a bunch of crap and call it good. My college class on anthropology has helped with sensible world-building more than anything else. I also majored in History. It makes sense to tap these resources because our characters - no matter how - alien must be human enough for readers to relate to.
by Kimber An May 9th, 2008 at 12:16 pmKimber An — sounds like a lot of us majored in history. [grin] I think it’s one of the better majors for a writer to have, actually. And anthropology is another great field of study for writers; I took three or four of those and they’ve been incredibly helpful. I learned more about basic economics and how much variety there’s been in how people have allocated resources across a group in my freshman level anthro class than I ever did taking an actual econ class.
our characters - no matter how - alien must be human enough for readers to relate to
Absolutely. [nod] Which is another thing history and anthro are good for — finding out just how many different ways there are to do things and think about the world, while still staying within the human perimeter. And the more diverse your data, the raw material you’ve gathered, the better you’ll be at making up something new and having it still ring true.
Angie
by Angela Benedetti May 9th, 2008 at 12:23 pmI like fantasy worlds because I can make it all up.
I wrote a story partially set in a city at the base of a dormant volcano. For research, I drove to Mount Rainier, and read about volcanic eruptions. Everything else I could pull out of my head, and off the web. It’s my city, I know how the air feels, how it smells, what the skyline looks like.
I’m writing a story now set in LA. Now I’ve been to LA a few times because my husband’s family lives there. But it’s just not enough. I can’t really find what I want on the web, or by asking questions of the Angelenos I know– oh, it helps here and there. But I can’t afford to fly to LA just for research, so instead I’m going to have to… hope it all works out? But it won’t. I know it won’t. I’ve read an urban fantasy set in Seattle that feels nothing like Seattle or the surrounding area. It’s Random American City, with a landmark or two. And as a reader living in Seattle, I felt cheated.
It’s definitely easier to write fantasy, where a library, the internet and a good brain for logic can carry the day. Sorry!
by Chrysoula Tzavelas May 9th, 2008 at 1:42 pmChrysoula — but if you actually visited a volcano, and did research on volcanic erruptions, you didn’t just make it all up. You did research both on and offline, absorbed some relevant realspace atmosphere and descriptions, and based your made-up volcano setting on that. Someone who “just” made it all up wouldn’t have bothered doing either, but would have pulled all their info and descriptions out of thin air and not even known what they got right and what made no sense. Sorry, you did it right after all.
Angie
by Angela Benedetti May 9th, 2008 at 2:01 pmHi!! I love the article and I can see you in it so completely. I tend to be a seat of the pants world builder - smoke and mirrors and hope for the best!
You have always been the consummate world ‘builder’, ‘arranger’, ‘argue abouter’ if you don’t agree!
Jess
by Jess May 9th, 2008 at 2:23 pm“I have no issue with writers who think it’s easy because their reaction is “Woohoo, worldbuilding!” and a dash to the library. [grin]”
This is me.
I do prelim setting things up, thinking out how things work, and then see what else comes up during the drafting, and make sure it all does fit together… my first draft tends to read somewhat generic because of this with just the major mechinations (sp) of the worldbuilding in play, then I go in and add depth.
Also, I wish I had been a history major - I’m 24 credits short for it; I had tried for a minor and wanted to just make it a major but would’ve needed another year of class so I let it go. *sniff*
And I’m so delighted to see today’s post talks about SF/F because I literally JUST finished a fantasy novel this morning. It’s set in a world with faeries who are intercessors between a watcher god and the people and it’s got all sorts of crazy going on.
by Jess May 9th, 2008 at 2:35 pmWell, my point was that I did make up most of it.
And that the real world IS harder to write, if you care about doing it ‘right’. Really, though, I just winced when you assumed that if somebody said ‘I like fantasy because I can make it all up’ the fantasy would be BAD.
I HAVE encountered the kind of writer you’re talking about, and it’s like nails on a chalkboard to hear somebody say, “Well, I’m writing fantasy about voodoo, but since it’s fantasy, I can make voodoo whatever I want!” But that was just one person.
by Chrysoula Tzavelas May 9th, 2008 at 2:42 pmI’ve had an issue with a recent series that I actually love. The problem is that it is set in the future, but in the place that I grew up. The author has made certain assumptions about what the natural landscape of that area would look like in a hundred years and some change.
It is just not right. I can tell that the author hasn’t been there. I laugh it off, but it does bother me. I keep thinking about the natural details I would have focused on if I had been the author, and how I would have described them.
The fact is, the area simply doesn’t get enough rainfall in certain areas to grow the forests she keeps talking about. The trees in the forests that are there don’t have the limb structure for what she uses them for, etc. Where she has forests, there would be open marsh wetlands and grasslands spotted with groves of native trees.
Sorry, I’m going off. But with those books, I can tell that the research done was not “personal experience,” but mostly secondhand and based off of assumptions.
And you’re right, it bothers me.
by Chessie May 9th, 2008 at 3:11 pmGreat, great post! I have read so many books in which it was clear the author did not bother to think about the underpinnings of the society and how things fit together.
I still think that writing fantasy is easier. Take, for example, the novel I wrote set in a society similar to Renaissance Europe. Although I stayed fairly faithful to the household technology of the time and chose crops and food animals suited to the climate I chose, I did not need a detailed knowledge of law codes, military ranks, geneology of the rulers and upper class, currency, costs of various items, potability of various rivers, and other things I would have needed to know to write an accurate historical novel.
by Shauna Roberts May 9th, 2008 at 3:16 pmJess @ 2:23 — thanks, hon. [grin/hug] I have to try, you know? Even when it’s just for fun, internal contradictions and things that just don’t make sense drive me nuts and I’ve just got to fix it!
Jess @ 2:35 — if you have the beginnings of a degree, you can keep going on your own. Whether or not you have the piece of paper doesn’t matter when you’re writing fiction, and it’s the raw material, the body of background knowledge a writer can draw upon which is important here.
And fairies and gods sounds interesting, not the sort of thing you see in every other book. Good luck with it!
Chrysoula — I wish it were just one person. [wry smile] I’ve seen that attitude over and over for many years, and it usually leads to really bad fiction. :/
Without having read your story, I can’t offer an opinion on whether just making it all up worked or not in your case. I’ll certainly grant that it’s possible, that you might’ve had the background knowledge you needed without really realizing it, or that your story might’ve been structured so as not to need or show much background detail. I will say, though, that after many years of both discussing and workshopping with authors who are trying to write fantasy and SF (especially when it’s not their primary field), and reading the results after they appear in the bookstores, my experience is that the vast majority of the time “just making it up” out of the air doesn’t work well. I’m absolutely willing to grant that there are probably exceptions, though. [nod]
Of course, the fact that some of this stuff does appear in the bookstores means there are also editors who don’t know any better — it’s not just a writer problem. That’s a whole ‘nother issue, though. [wry smile]
Chessie — I think a lot of people assume that their own body of knowledge is the baseline, and that if they personally wouldn’t know the difference then neither would anyone else. It’s not even a conscious assumption, either; it’s just a subconscious assumption we make about how the world works. There’ll always be someone out there who knows better, though, and quite possibly a lot of someones. It’s worth doing the research to get things right, whether that means real-world research on a specific place or system research so you know enough to make up something that sounds realistic; there’s always someone out there who’ll know that that piece of ground should be marsh and not forest.
Or who’ll squint and realize that your world’s economy doesn’t hold up, or that the land you’ve described on page twelve wouldn’t be able to feed the population you described on page thirty-seven.
Shauna — thanks.
While you might not’ve had to do the work of looking up every detail to make it true to a real-world historical time and place, you did have to come up with those details and make sure they fit together and that all the pieces did their jobs. It’s really easy to make mistakes here. If you have enough background to be able to put things together and make them hum without doing a lot of research for each individual story, then that’s great. Not everyone has the background knowledge to do that, though, and I’ve suffered through some painful results, both in manuscript form for workshops and in forms I’d unfortunately paid for. [rueful smile]
I think what’s “easy” or not depends on the writer’s background. Someone who’d have to look up reams of details to construct a particular historical setting is likely to think that’s difficult, whereas that same person might have the background knowledge to “just” make up a fantasy setting that holds together, and believe that that’s easier. But someone else who has all those historical facts in their head but doesn’t have the comprehension of how the systems work under the hood and would have to do a lot of research for that to write a fantasy novel, and might think the historical is easier.
My point is that all that knowledge and data has to come from somewhere at some point. What feels easier to Writer A or Writer B will likely depend on what sort of knowledge they already have and what sort they’d have to go acquire, special for this particular writing project. For some people it’d be the historical detail, for others it’d be the info on how government and economy and technology and belief and legality and geography and whatever else all function and fit together. It’s just as much work to do the one as the other, if a writer is doing a good job. But some writers will have done part of the work — possibly a pretty large part — while reading and learning and studying and whatever all else in the past.
It’s like, if you want to buy a house, having $100K in savings, or having a condo to sell, makes affording the house you want feel a lot easier, because you already have a big chunk of the resources you need. You had to acquire those resources from somewhere, though; you just did it in the past, over some period of time, so it feels “easier” to save what you still need to buy that house than it would for the person next to you who just got out of college and is starting out with $3.92 in change plus a McDonalds gift certificate. But you were probably at the $3.92 + gift cert. stage at some point in your life, and you had to work to get from there to where you are now. The work of accumulating the resources you need has to be done, whether now or earlier. If you did a lot of it before, then what’s left will feel “easy,” although looking at how you got to that “it’s easy” stage makes it clear that there was a lot of work involved at some point. Does that make sense?
Angie
by Angela Benedetti May 9th, 2008 at 7:12 pmGood points, Angie. I have a Ph.D. in anthropology, took many history-related classes in college, and have read history for fun for many years. So I have a broad overview of how many kinds of societies work (which helps me create fantasy worlds) but I don’t have the precise knowledge of one country at one specific time period that I would need to write a historical novel. So you’re right, my background certainly influences which comes easier to me.
by Shauna Roberts May 9th, 2008 at 7:21 pmShauna — umm, yeah, I’d say you have about $1.5mil in the bank and are ready to go for that five-bedroom on an acre in the hills over San Jose without too much additional sweating required.
With an anthro doctorate, I’m not at all surprised you find it easy to create new settings and cultures.
Angie
by Angela Benedetti May 9th, 2008 at 8:46 pmYour point about vampires is very well taken and is one reason I’ve not been a huge fan of vampire stories over my life, although I’ve written some myself.
As for just making it all up, well we all bring our own backgrounds into it, of course. I have a fair background in history so it helps me alot. I don’t mind, however, when fantasy writers tend to mix elements together that might not normally be found together in the real world. I kind of like that complexity and it offers interesting twists for stories. I do want to see things like the local economy definitely taken into account though. It really bothers me when a city survives in a place where no food can grow and there is nothing abotu caravans hauling it in.
by Charles Gramlich May 11th, 2008 at 12:21 pmCharles — that’s it exactly. [nod] Having, say, an Egyptian-like culture living in a desert oasis doing quillwork like the Native Americans is fine, if they have a source of quills. Mixing elements can be interesting and give some very cool effects, so long as some thought is putting into making those mixed elements fit together smoothly.
It really bothers me when a city survives in a place where no food can grow and there is nothing abotu caravans hauling it in.
Yes, definitely. [facepalm] You need massive agriculture, massive trade, or both at a slightly-less-than-massive level. And relying on imports can cause a lot of headaches in other areas, as it did the Romans.
Angie
by Angie May 11th, 2008 at 5:59 pm