Worldbuilding Wednesday: Putting the Fun in Fundamentals
That’s right, I said it.
Have fun.
Shocking! Scandalous! How gauche!
Well, buckle in, because I’m only getting started.
::takes time to safely buckle in, checks the straps, gives a thumbs up::
I was doing an interview for Audition For The Fox, (out on 9/16 and you can buy a copy here), and we were discussing where certain things came from. There’s all sorts of worldbuilding in the book and a lot of it ties together, all coming together in a fun, messy little bow. And while I was able to make sense of them and build in those connections later, guess where these terms and ideas came from?
Just my brain. Just the muscles that work whenever I need to think of narrative and building a world.
And the reason behind things like naming my gods the Ninety-Nine Pillars of Heaven? Making them all animals? Framing fables as “Clay and Cloud Stories,” all that?
I just did it because it was fun and it sounded cool.
Later on, such as during this interview, it’s easier to look back with a higher perspective and say, “Oh yeah, I think this is where it came from.” But for the most part, I just went where my instincts took me.
As we begin to talk about the fundamentals of worldbuilding, strengthening that narrative muscle in your head and heart, THAT doesn’t just come from nowhere. You’re going to fumble a lot, and you should. You don’t know what works until you spend a little time figuring out what doesn’t. And the only way you do that is by . . . having fun. Seriously!
The sooner you can internalize that writing, even when it is a nocked arrow aimed directly at the hope of a long-lasting career, needs to be founded in joy first, the happier you’ll be. Not to say there can’t be additional reasons, too, but if joy is NOT a part of your process, it will make things tougher in my personal opinion. But if you can start from joy and keep it in your heart all the days of the year, Scrooge-style, (Scrooge at the end of course, after ghosts have scared the bejeezus out of him), then you’ll have an easier time writing and also loving the work of writing.
You don’t need to write a book that isn’t working. You don’t need to explore a character you hate. You don’t need to detail a government that’s boring as shit.
But you don’t know if those things will work until you try. And if it doesn’t work? Save it for later. Ideas are boomerang in shape and though they can fly further afield, they do always come back. And when they do, maybe you have a better project for it, or a new idea. or maybe you’re ready to retire it. But don’t throw anything out. It all accumulates, in a good way.
But experimenting and having fun is how you train that narrative muscle. Maybe you really like elemental magic and you want to focus on air because this is a world of floating sky-islands, so of course, they’d want to master that first. Maybe you had an idea for a country where everyone wears an eyepatch, and depending on the color or texture or something, it says something about the eyeball that was taken and who took it. Maybe you had an idea for a monster from traditional folklore like a werewolf but want to give it a sci-fi twist, so it’s robot whose organic bits are from a shapeshifter and every full moon she turns into a human?
Maybe you’ll write 500 words. Maybe you’ll write 10 pages. But either way, you’re going to hit a point where you go, “hey this idea has enough to it that, I do think there’s a story here!” Or you don’t, and you say, “Hmm, a shapeshifting werebot is cool, but uh, what does it do?” And maybe you sit on that for a bit until you have a different idea. And then, when you stumble upon Grimm’s Orbital Satellite Array, who else could run a fairytale space station?
We’ll get more into the narrative muscle training, but the first part really is pushing down those walls you’ve put up, constructed either by writing books or teachers or the internet, and centering your creative process around joy and fun. If you can start trying to do that, maybe whatever comes of it isn’t Grade-A material, but hey, you had fun making it, right?
And that’s what it’s all about.
Prompt: Take one of your loose ideas, and then find 3-5 ways to reinterpret it. Like the elemental example above: what element becomes important if nations are landlocked? If nations are riddled with volcanoes or poisonous air? Extrapolate and have fun with it!
Reading: The Library at Hellebore by Cassandra Khaw
Listening to: Big Fish Radio on Pandora, because I am 67 years old