On Worldbuilding

It has been… a week. I haven’t been feeling that well, and there was a night I didn’t sleep well. But it ended well, weirdly enough, and there was a surprising amount of food throughout? It’s weird. I am expecting that I’ll be much better going forward though. And I’m almost done with the main story of Ghost of Tsushima! Maybe I’ll finish that soon.

Anyhow, let’s talk about worldbuilding.

On Worldbuilding

This isn’t meant to be a ‘how to’ as much as a ‘why I think it’s important to get this kind of information to your audience.’

Part of the reason I’ve been thinking about worldbuilding recently is that, going on a mad rush through fantasy books, it’s interesting to see how different writers approach the issue. I keep thinking back to a post I read recently that said that worldbuilding is to fantasy and science-fiction what musical numbers are to musicals, an essential part of the genre, and it’s weird that many critics treat it as an irrelevant part of the story. Essentially, if your musical numbers are terrible, your musical isn’t good, even if the dialogue and acting and costume design are perfect. 

I don’t know if I’d say that, but it’s an interesting perspective to think about.

But I do remember that in the mid-2000’s there were a bajillion different bits of advice for aspiring fantasy writers floating around the Internet, all insisting that you must put in hours of hard work in order to build a believable world for the audience. This has lessened significantly–now you’re more likely to see advice pieces for other areas. It’s still very important though, and thinking on books I read recently, I think about why and what works and doesn’t work for me in worldbuilding.

So as I put in the Book Diary, I recently read The School for Good & Evil from the library, and one of the criticisms I had of the book was that the novel’s worldbuilding didn’t feel all that deeply thought-out. I didn’t have much idea of how this world worked, or what its history was even like outside of the titular school. King Arthur is a guy who apparently existed in this universe, fairly recently, within the same timeline as Cinderella and Robin Hood. I realize that we’re putting this all under the label of ‘fairy tales’ but this is kind of a lot to sort of handwave as ‘that happened, yeah, in some indeterminate somewhat recent time’.

[Fables did this better, if I remember correctly, and even then there was a clear progression of time, and most of the fairy tale events happened hundreds of years before the modern day story. Also I’m thinking I might do a Note about fairy tales too.]

Heck, I wasn’t sure that students who weren’t first years even existed because none of them did anything remotely relevant.

I also criticized the worldbuilding of The Tapestry series because I didn’t get good footing on what the world outside of Rowan, the magic school, was supposed to be like. So when the second book talks about the outside world getting desolated by the forces of Astaroth, this meant very little to me, because I didn’t have that great of an idea of what the world was supposed to be like other than ‘mostly like ours.’

I was pleasantly surprised by how the third book tackled it though. In that book, Astaroth has taken over the world and divided up between his generals to rebuild as they see fit–so when Max goes out and explores the world, he’s seeing this all for the first time, the way the audience is. We’re both having the same experience of seeing a hostile world overrun by the enemy’s forces for the first time, and so the worldbuilding works much better.

[The strategy of ‘have the audience discover it as the protagonist does’ is a solid one. It’s why you have so many fantasy stories about characters who are brought into the fantasy world, or who are noobs from backwater villages–that way they can learn a lot of information as the audience is and not come across as an idiot.]

I think there’s also a lot of things that books can do with worldbuilding that’s understated. There’s this very interesting thing going on in The Goblin Emperor that I think is very interesting–I suspect that we’re meant to draw the conclusion that the only difference, biologically, between goblins and elves in the story, is the color of their skin, making it not an issue of species but of race. But no one actually says that. Mind you, it’s not really subtext that Maia’s goblin heritage is held against him by some of the other aristocrats, but it’s an interesting twist on the idea of goblins and elves that I don’t think most authors would even think about.

When you have good, solid worldbuilding, the reader can come to conclusions about the world that enrich their understanding of the work, and the characters, and what the author’s trying to say. It’s most important that it’s there, period though–when it’s not, it’s hard for audiences to feel immersed in the fictional world you’re trying to build. Very often, it seems as if you’re making it up as you go. 

[And to be clear, you’re allowed to do that, but it’s better if it doesn’t seem that way.]

I don’t know if it’s as essential as musical numbers to a good musical, but it is essential if you want to make a fantasy story feel like it has any sort of depth, like you know how the setting works.

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