The Sword and Laser discussion

In my latest blog post I explore the importance of world-building to the fantasy genre. I'd love to hear what other genre fans think about this fascinating topic!

Please follow this link to read the article:

http://damienblackwords.com/Blog/worl...

Damien wrote: ". . . the importance of world-building to the fantasy genre. ..."
OK, followed the link, read (most of) the blog post. Interesting point of view, interesting approach . . .
Yes, world-building is a very important part of Fantasy . . . though there is room to argue over 'urban Fantasy' and 'magical realism', both subgenres tend to use a lot of 'the world as it is'.
Personally, I use a different approach - I have a main 'pay-off' scene in my head, usually some big magical or heroic event, ideally with the baddie getting his/her just deserts in a humorously embarrassing way (see below) - and then I write towards that target.
It does involve quite a bit of world-building on the way.

So broadly, I agree with you, world building is a major factor - though 'best feature' or 'jewel in the crown' might be a small overstatement.

(Footnote - apologies, shameless self-promotion . . . several examples, starting in the free samples here or here)

I'm always puzzled by reviewers that complain about the backstory and world-building. Maybe you're reading the wrong genre...

I love the world building aspect of fantasy and I appreciate the work and effort that goes into it. It is especially important for epic fantasy--more so than other sub-genres in my opinion. I think Robert Jordan did an incredible job with this in his Wheel of Time series. I write epic fantasy as well and I literally have excel spreadsheets helping me keep track of each nation, the politics, the history, the monetary systems, the common expressions, etc...

For fans of epic fantasy, a well crafted world with beautiful maps is a huge plus. As an author, having done the hard work of creating a detailed world actually makes writing much easier because I don't have to make it up as I go. It really helps to add color to scenes and avoid writers block.

Yes I definitely think it depends on what sub genre you are writing in. Low fantasy or magic realism will naturally require less world-building, whereas high or epic fantasy will tend to put a lot of emphasis on it.

Perry I hear you about the spreadsheets, although to make it more fun I've written almost a wikipedia series of entries covering the different countries. I'm actually thinking of collating, expanding and publishing my notes further down the line once I've established the Broken Stone Series a bit more!

And drawing maps is an added bonus in my humble opinion! Brings in a bit of artistry no? I've started off with just the one map, covering three realms, for Devil's Night Dawning, the first book in my dark/epic fantasy saga - I want to tease the readers a bit, but they'll be getting plenty more as the story unfolds and my protagonists explore their world!

There really is a lot of craft that goes into world-building: maps, politics, religions, history, you have so many elements to explore and develop and I for one love it. I agree Joe, I can't see why reviewers would complain of this!

Alan wrote: "Damien wrote: ". . . the importance of world-building to the fantasy genre. ..."
OK, followed the link, read (most of) the blog post. Interesting point of view, interesting approach . . .
Yes, worl..."

I had a quick glance - Newhome, I quite like that... Simple and direct, just like the real-life colonists! So what you're doing there is world-building in sci-fi by the looks of it... yeah that must give you plenty of scope.

Damien wrote: "There really is a lot of craft that goes into world-building: maps, politics, religions, history, you have so many elements to explore and develop and I for one love it..."
Agreed! Note also (but don't judge!) that quite a few of the self-published writers of Fantasy - and there's a lot of them about - are in the game because to them it is a game rather than a business. They accept that only the very few who get picked up by the major publishers are ever going to make a pile of dosh from writing, so while they may dream about doing so (don't we all! Film contract anyone?) they are mostly there for the sake of a few sales, some good reviews, and a lot of fun - and the world-building, politics, mapping, associated artwork, etc, etc are all part of that fun.
Of course, some are good at it . . and some aren't! Everyone else just has to dig through a lot of dross to find the occasional gem, that the agents and publishers also haven't picked up on yet (if ever!). But the gems are there - that's why I keep reading!

I hear you, Alan... And here's hoping I have crafted a gem myself, though of course it's very hard to judge one's own work! I hope you get around to reading my humble tome one day... I'd be very interested to hear what you make of it! But regardless, it is fun though I have ambitions for my work as doubtless most authors do...

Damien wrote: "Alan wrote: "So what you're doing there is world-building in sci-fi by the looks of it. ..."
There is some sci-fi underpinning, but mostly it is Fantasy - because we use magic.
I don't regard F & SF as two separate genres - they are two ends of a spectrum. Work in/near the middle range of that spectrum could be defined by Clarke's Law "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." and/or exemplified by McCaffrey's dragons which (if you read enough of her work) you find are gene-engineered.

Damien wrote: "I hope you get around to reading my humble tome one day......"
Your humble tome is flagged - but my TBR list is growing faster than my Kindle recharger can keep up, so I am not going to promise a date!

Damien wrote: "here's hoping I have crafted a gem myself, though of course it's very hard to judge one's own work! ..."
Second that, very strongly! And of course, tastes differ - and even your own tastes may change over the years. I suppose you just have to get as many reviews as you can - and hope they are from people whose tastes resemble your own!

Alan wrote: "Damien wrote: "I hope you get around to reading my humble tome one day......"
Your humble tome is flagged - but my TBR list is growing faster than my Kindle recharger can keep up, so I am not going..."
No problem - in your own time! I'm in this for the long game in any case :)

Alan wrote: "Damien wrote: "here's hoping I have crafted a gem myself, though of course it's very hard to judge one's own work! ..."
Second that, very strongly! And of course, tastes differ - and even your own ..."
Yeah, that's the idea pretty much - hence my being in it for the long game - that and the simple fact that I do this for its own sake as well. Writing helps to balance me out, once upon a time it was the same with playing/writing music.

Damien wrote: "Writing helps to balance me out, once upon a time it was the same with playing/writing music..."
Yes, understood. I am retired, so don't need so much psychotherapy nowadays - but one of my books (as yet unpublished) was written as self-imposed therapy after a job went bad. And my other time-filler is woodcarving. The simple pleasure of carefully marking out a block of wood, fixing it to a suitable clamp, then taking a sharp gouge and a very large mallet . . .

Alan wrote: "Damien wrote: "Writing helps to balance me out, once upon a time it was the same with playing/writing music..."
Yes, understood. I am retired, so don't need so much psychotherapy nowadays - but one..." Yes, I can see how that would work wonders for the psyche! I dabbled briefly in clay moulding and it was very satisfying... But nowadays I carve words! To that end, I'm off to hammer out another blog article damienblackwords/blog aka Old Nick's Letters... We'll talk again soon, no doubt :)

It's funny, but I see the complaints about worldbuilding in SciFi, and think that for every one of those people, there is someone else who loves that aspect. In some of my SciFi, it was the action pieces that got me fired up to write, but when I decided to write my thousand page epic, I found those long sequences of worldbuilding captivated and drove me more than the action in that piece. Though maybe where people seem to complain about Howey going on about the stairs too much in his Wool series, I might have gone on a little too much toward the beginning about a stupid little tree that grew on the title character's home moon.

J.J. wrote: "It's funny, but I see the complaints about worldbuilding in SciFi, and think that for every one of those people, there is someone else who loves that aspect. In some of my SciFi, it was the action ..." See that's the thing JJ, I too am spellbound by world-building... So much so that I decided two of my protagonists would be learned friars - yes, their 'action' role in the story is to fight evil spirits and track down warlocks, but they also gave me a chance to work a lot of historical background into the story - hopefully in a natural way that doesn't jar the reader!

I've travelled a lot and I thought it would be interesting to have characters that are essentially telling you about the world you're reading as they go from one danger to the next! That seems to work in historical fiction, so I thought why not for fantasy...

For me world-building is just so integral to the genre - I think you're probably right in that it polarises opinion!

And this is precisely why I don't read long fantasy series - I hate long interludes describing the monetary system of a country or the history of the last 3 centuries or other things that the author may find fascinating but that aren't germane to telling the story. The main issue for me is that these *aren't* world building. They're fantasy tourism. By all means create a complex description of your world and let it inform your fiction. But when I pick up a book I'm doing so to hear your story, not to read about the stew your heroes love. Fiction is a dialog between author and reader, not (to me) a way for the author to indulge themselves (that said, there are people that LOVE the things I dislike... such is life.)

Two examples of what I mean here -

The classic, LotR. Tolkien created a detailed history and language and it bleeds through the pages and gives the impression of a world that has a complex, deep history but we only hear of that history obliquely. He created languages but brings out the difference by example. In the Council of Elrond section Gandalf speaks the words inscribed on the Ring and conveys in a sentence or two the dark power and harshness of that language. We don't need a treatise on it to know it's evil and unsubtle.

My second example was explicitly written as epic fantasy without the tourist aspects, Harry Connolly's The Way Into Chaos trilogy. He builds a rich, fascinating world upended by an event at the start and, over the course of 3 books, shows us that world by having his characters forced to explore and interact with much of it. There aren't any down parts where he talks about the world with nothing else happening, yet at the end of the trilogy you'll have a very clear picture of the world.

To me, those are both worldbuilding. Shorter way to state this? Show, don't tell.

I agree exactly, I love fantasy and science fiction for the worlds and cultures created but if you have to stop the story and explain it... Well that's just poor writing. The world should permeate the story, it should be implicit in what the characters do and how their story develops. also we don't need to know the whys of everything, a little mystery is fine.

I think if a character is telling other characters about the history etc of the world that is fine. If the author is doing it then it should be used selectively.

Tolkien, Lynch, Rothfuss - even on occasion that great minimalist of the modern-day genre Joe Abercrombie - are all writers who spend time describing backdrop, sometimes in the words of a character, sometimes as the author.

I do not think any of the above are poor writers. Think of the scene when Aragorn is on Weathertop with the hobbits and he tells them the story of Beren and Luthien. This has nothing to do with the narrative, which can roughly be summarised as: hobbits and ranger trying to make it to Rivendell without being hacked to ribbons by Nazgul/Gandalf gone missing.

What Tolkien does is he quite consciously interrupts the narrative to give his world more depth. In doing so he not only adds richness to his writing, but he also draws out the dramatic tension. It's a pause in the drama, and guess what... it works!

I'm sorry but I think world-building is very much a matter of taste, and to denigrate writers who consciously choose to place emphasis on it seems a bit harsh to my mind.

Damien wrote: "I'm sorry but I think world-building is very much a matter of taste..."

This is true of any aspect of Sci Fi or fantasy. I see it in any discussion of aspects people love/hate, and posters pile on something like tense or POV a story is told in, tropes such as zombies, the ubiquity of the infamous info-dump. And for every poster that claims they hate something common in a genre, you can likely find ten genuine classics employing it. It ultimately comes down not to what a writer decides to do with their story, or how they choose to tell it, but can they do it successfully. I'm not a fan of zombies/PA fiction for example, but I have read and reviewed a few that were very good.

Damien - there's a VAST different between the occasional digression that takes a handful of pages and taking several chapters with long explanations of the background of something. Doing the latter is, I feel, poor writing and you'll notice that Tolkien doesn't do that. The conversations are natural, occur for story driven reasons (Aragorn is trying to bond a bit with the hobbits) and don't digress for a huge chunk of pages. In fact, they mostly serve the overall arc of the story (I haven't read Lynch so can't comment... I'm not sure Rothfuss supports your point, really).

A matter of taste? Of course. Can't criticize people who spend entire books not advancing the story? Of course I can - that's MY taste. You don't get to use the taste argument to support your side of things and then exclude people who don't share your tastes.

Again, read the Connolly books I linked above. You get a very good sense of the world since the characters travel through a lot of it but they are always doing something, not sitting around a fire reminiscing for 70 pages about the history of some empire, etc. He wrote the books specifically to see if he could tell a compelling story in a world that feels detailed and alive but without all of the touristy side bits.

My point is that the right way to build a convincing world is to tell the story in such a way that by the end of it we have not only heard a great tale but have a sense that it occurred in a real, detailed place. On the other hand, long digressions to info dump strike me as the lazy way to world-build. Show, don't tell, remember?

Finally, I think it's a fine thing for an author to develop a detailed history of their world. But they need to carefully consider how much of that needs to be dumped on the reader. Doing it just because it's their enthusiasm is little more than authorial masturbation.

World-building is a lot like model ship building. What you've made looks pretty, but it doesn't do anything. Like model ship building, it's a hobby best kept to yourself. If an author feels like it helps their writing process, then great! But the audience doesn't need to know about the kind of postage stamps your world uses if it doesn't impact the story.

Nick - please try to relax a bit. I wanted a discussion not an aggressive debate. It's unwarranted and uncivilised. You wouldn't aggress someone to their face would you? Try to be more respectful when you write posts - I respect others and I expect the same from them. I do see your point but arrogance is unbecoming at the best of times.

It seems I haven't been entirely clear. I think the trick to good fantasy writing is to have as full a knowledge as you can of your own world, and the balance lies in knowing when to reveal aspects of it to the reader, and when to simply let it inform you as the writer. I don't see the harm in having characters talk about their world's history if that's what the character would realistically do. Multiple chapters/70 pages devoted purely to quasi-history... WTF? I never said anything about that!

In all honesty, I can't be the judge of how well I've succeeded in getting the balance right - that's for readers of my work to decide. I think on the whole I have refrained from introducing aspects of my world where it wasn't helpful to the plot, background or characters. But I'll be the first to admit I'm far from perfect, I may not have got said balance right (yet).

All I can say to that is check out my work (if you dare!) and judge for yourselves. I'm learning my trade as I go, which is pretty much all any writer does... However, I get the feeling that assumptions are already being made by some people on this thread.

Thank you and I do hope this thread that I started is not going to degenerate into one of those tawdry online slanging matches. I am happy to take criticism but will not tolerate any deviation from good manners. I do not think this is unreasonable!

Im perfectly relaxed. You seem to want to determine how people talk and to be uncomfortable with people not agreeing with your points, so I'm out.

PS: Next time you use a term and only want it used one way, define it. Plenty of 'world building' is of the WoT kind where there are digressions for entire chapters etc. No one can read you mind - it's up to you to be explicit.