Tag Archives: On Writing

Rereading

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Let’s talk about rereading!

Wait a minute, you say. We just went over reading, didn’t we?

Of course in practice it’s probably a bad idea to reread something immediately after reading it. Also, it’s probably not worth your time to reread everything you read once. But really good writing, the kind of stuff that grabs you and runs, the kind that moves your heart and keeps your brain churning, that kind of stuff is worth reading more than once, particularly if you aspire to be a writer.

Rereading, particularly if you took notes or just wrote a rough sketch of your impressions after you read something the first time, is a great way for you to glean out the most important lessons from a book or story. I’m not talking about life lessons, although many stories have an Aesop or two built into them. I’m talking about the lessons that help you be more the writer you want to be.

Did you just read something that left you slack jawed and drooling, it was so amazing? Reread it. Now don’t shove your mouth closed, wipe your chin and go back to the top of the page, it’s best to finish the entire story or book before you reread something, but do make a little note for yourself and, a week or two later, come back and read that part again, maybe the whole chapter, or if it’s a short story just reread the whole thing.

You’re probably thinking to yourself, “But reading it again that quickly robs it of so much impact.”

Exactly. The problem with great writing is, the first time you read it, it sweeps you along so easily it looks effortless, when in fact the writing was probably very difficult. You need to slow down and really examine what made that passage speak to you. Was it word choice? What about those words struck you? Pacing and cadence? What rhythms and turns of phrase make it work? Is the scene the culmination of several preceding moments in the story? How does the author tie it all together for the audience?

Read for the story and the inspiration. Reread to appreciate the craftsmanship.

Another reason to reread is to see how a story speaks to you in a different stage of life. Truly great works appeal to people of all ages and backgrounds. In order to understand how they can do that it’s important to see them from as many perspectives as possible. While having a group of people that love stories and talking about them is a valuable resource in meeting that goal, so is carefully rereading stories that you loved when your life was different.

Has your impression of the book changed because you are older/married/(un)employed? Does the story still speak to you in the same way? In new ways? If the old spark is gone, can you think of ways the author might have kept it? You have changed, but if you’re a writer then writing is likely to be a lifetime obsession. Let your changing perspective teach you more about great writing.

If you’re anything like me you have shelves full of great books. Maybe there’s one or two you haven’t thought of in a while. Take them down and get reacquainted. Your old friends still have a lot to tell you, after all.

Reading

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It may seem intuitive to some people, but reading is as much a part of the art of writing as the actual writing is.

Now, I’m not just talking about the need to read over what you’ve written, edit it and generally strive to turn it into stronger writing. That’s important, don’t get me wrong, and any author who’s not doing that needs to rethink their approach. And I’m not talking about reading how to books or other kinds of study. Again, very important but not where I’m going.

What I’m talking about is reading things that will inspire and shape your writing. This doesn’t mean plagiarism, which doesn’t reflect an improvement to your writing at all, but rather finding writers who tell the stories you’d want to tell, and then studying what they do. C.S. Lewis said in his preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology that he probably never wrote a book in which he did not quote from George MacDonald, but their works are markedly different on the whole. While you may never find an author that inspires you to the same extent as MacDonald did for Lewis, it’s certainly worth taking the time to try.

Reading other works can inspire you with themes and story ideas. While I’ve said before that a writer probably never runs out of story ideas, seeing how others have implemented similar ideas can shape your own in a number of ways. It might suggest things you could do to avoid overlap, point out weaknesses in the story idea you should avoid or just help you fine tune your idea by showing you what works.

Reading the works of others also helps you work out a solid idea of what good writing looks like. This applies just as much to nonfiction as to fiction. Tightly written news articles or engaging nonfiction books are just as valuable to fiction writers in helping you understand good prose as scintillating dialog and well drawn fiction characters are. Of course, the nonfiction writer benefits just as much from reading good fiction. The applications may not be as immediately obvious to you, but they’re real and noticeable.

But most of all, reading the words of others helps you understand your own writing preferences better. Keep a record of what you read, what you like about it and what you don’t like about it. Find sections you really like and break down what appeals to you about them. Find sections you feel could be better and then make them better. Don’t read passively, read actively. While stories are meant to move you and engage you, they’re at their best when you reciprocate and engage with them.

What you read is one of the biggest influences on how and what your write. If your desire is to be a skilled and able writer, you can’t help but need to take charge of what you read, study it, master it and turn it around into something that bolsters your writing. So what are you waiting for? Hit up your local library* and start reading.

 

*Full Disclosure: The author works for his local library, and may be biased in recommending libraries over other book suppliers.

Author’s Obligations: The Audience

Posted by natechen on

You do not become an author simply because you want to have a good time. Being an author is a job, and it comes with certain responsibilities. They vary in importance and some of them are more important for fiction or non-fiction authors. But they are there, and if you’re not living up to them then the ugly truth is you are failing as an author. Obviously, it’s important for the aspiring author to know what they are.

If you’ve done any writing at all, you probably have some idea of what these responsibilities are already. Watch your grammar, mind your punctuation and know your story. But the more ways you see them, the more ways you can think of them, the more they will shape your writing and the better your writing will be. So what’s the first, most important duty of the author? Is it to clean, flowing prose? Good grammar and punctuation? No, the first duty of the author is to your audience.

Writing is a part of the art of communication. When you are writing you must be aware of the person or people who are reading, if they cannot understand you then you have failed to communicate. Therefore you must be mindful of your audience if you hope to succeed. Don’t get so caught up in your story that it runs away from you, it’s very unlikely your audience will be able to follow all the places it takes you unless you take the time to carefully mark the path. In short, know your audience.

So, who is your audience?

Well, as contradictory as it may seem, the author’s first audience is themselves. Yes, I’ve just said that it’s important not to get too wrapped up in your own story but, at the same time, the person who has to be most invested in understanding and enjoying your writing must be you. If you don’t buy into what you’re writing 100%, no one else will buy in at all. What’s important is to look at your story through the eyes of the reader. You need to set aside everything you already know about the story you are writing and look at it as if you’d never heard of anything in it before. Learn to put aside your author’s perspective and see if you can enjoy what you’ve written on it’s own merits.

The second audience is the people who share an interest in what you’re writing about. They are your most importance, core audience, they are the ones who will read your story and then want to share it with others. While self editing is the first hurdle for your story, you will need feedback from this part of your audience before you can call your story complete. Can they follow your ideas? Do they enjoy your story? Is there some barrier to understanding that needs to be removed? You can’t evaluate these things yourself, you’re not objective enough nor do you really count as a large enough sampling to be useful. You need feedback from your core audience if you hope to communicate with them.

The third audience is the people who are in the “mainstream”, a mythological group of people who include pretty much everyone who’s not a part of your core audience. While “mainstream” supposedly refers to popular culture, the fact is it’s really too varied to count for much. It’s just changing too fast and doing different things for different people, trying to target it would be like trying to hit all the heads on a hydra with a single toothpick. Some people from the general public will love your work, some will hate it and the vast majority will most likely view it with a certain amount of apathy (if the majority loves it, you’ve crossed over into the rarefied atmosphere of the smash hit, and I’d love to hear how it’s done). Regardless, while it’s important to try and make sure the “mainstream” can understand what you’ve written, you cannot chase after their approval of stories or themes. If you do, your writing will have no identity and will never find a following.

Obviously, there’s a lot more to knowing your audience than what I’ve written. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to codify in one or two short articles. You have to read a lot of what your audience loves, you have to know some members of your audience personally and spend a lot of time with them. An author can’t just sit in a chair 24/7 and write then expect to be successful. He has to be out with his audience, as well. Fortunately, you’re probably going to like the people you meet, since your first audience is yourself and thus your second audience is likely to share interests with you.

So get up and go out for a bit, get to know your audience. Then, the next time you sit down, ask how your stories and theirs can link up. You may find your writing improves for it.

Viral

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If you are an unheard of person trying to make your mark on the Internet, then going viral is a dream come true. It means instant exposure to a huge audience, some part of which is probably going to find you and your content wildly appealing. That, in turn, means that you will get even more exposure, popularity, fame, wealth and general dating ability.

A brief interlude, in which I will explain what “going viral” means to my readers who are not “down” with “internet jive” (hi mom!) Going viral refers to when something on the Internet experiences a sudden boost in popularity entirely by word of mouth. News of the viral event travels from person to person and usually happens with little or no need for a middleman, much like an epidemic, from which the term “viral” comes. Social media has made it easier and easier for things to go viral over the Internet, just as modern transportation has made epidemics more and more of a worry. Any piece of media can go viral, but it typically refers to a YouTube video or, in rare cases a comic (as in a stand-alone illustration, although it sometimes refers to serialized webcomics).

A very recent example of a viral event is PSY’s Gangnam Style. If you are one of the five people in America who aren’t familiar with this little bit of Korean absurdity, let me spread the infection a little bit more.

Wasn’t that fun? Whether you like it or hate it, Gangnam Style is now a part of the American consciousness. A year ago, how many people you know could answer the following question:

“Who or what is Gangnam?

A) A district in Seoul, South Korea.

B) A battle mecha franchise from Japan.

C) A new kind of inner city gang.”

If you’re like mot people, the answer is none. But now they’ll all say, “Oh, that’s the song with the Asian guy who rides the ponies, right?” And they’d be right, because going viral has the power to define things in the cultural consciousness. And that’s on top of the fame, money and hordes of attractive single people.

Many people come to the Internet, and indeed to blogs such as this one, with a fairly simple plan in mind:

Step 1. Go viral.

Step 2. ???

Step 3. Profit!

What they quickly learn is that it doesn’t actually work that way. In fact, the order should probably be:

Step 1. ???

Step 2. Go viral.

Step 3. Profit!

You see, all the real work goes in before you make the big break. Even in the age of the Internet, there’s no easy win. You have to put in the time and dedication to make even a little bit of a mark. Viral videos generally have three things in common.

First, there’s the dedication to craft. PSY was a successful Korean pop artist long before he went viral. One of the earliest viral events was “All Your Base“, a video put together by video editing students as part of a major project. In fact, look at pretty much any major viral event that has resulted in lasting success and you’ll find that it had a higher than normal level of finish work, proof of a dedication to making good content. The creator probably had a string of much less successful work before they made their big break.

Second, there’s a love of what’s being done. Look at AutoTune the News, makers of more than one viral video. Sure, their videos are silly and the music isn’t really that memorable. But the real magic is that they bring out the music the creators hear in every day speech. That love goes into the songs they right and attracts people to them. By the same token, PSY has said that Gangnam Style was not created to be an international sensation. It was a love song to the Gangnam district, a celebration of all the things that make it unique and lovable.

Third, there’s a willingness to have fun. I’m not aware of any viral events on the Internet that are people playing things completely straight. If you want to go viral, you can’t take yourself very seriously. Again, look at Gangnam Style. PSY blows himself up, engages in a dancing duel with a man in a plastic suit and rides invisible horses everywhere. And he obviously has a great time doing it. We want to share that fun with him, and we’re sucked in with him.

Ultimately, I don’t think anyone can intentionally go viral. But your can create in such a way as to make it much more viable. On the other hand, when you go viral there are far fewer people who have been with you since the beginning and come to have a true appreciation of your work and goals. You may not have the support and emotional maturity to deal with the sudden exposure. And you may not want the huge, impersonal masses staring over your shoulder, wanting you to repeat the old successes when you’re seeking to press on to newer and better things.

Should you go viral? Well, that’s really up to you. It will probably be a fun and wild ride if you do. But whatever your goal, it’s best to work relentlessly at something you love. Keep presenting your work in the right forums, taking feedback and never give up and you’ll be surprised where you wind up.

Nonlinear Writing

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Part One

Often one of the biggest excuses to not write you’ll hear from an aspiring writer is that they’re not “in the mood” (or perhaps that they are “waiting for inspiration”). On the one hand, it’s important to realize that writing, just like all other forms of art, is work. You have to sit down and do it on a regular basis, no matter what, regardless of how you feel about it. If you don’t, you never get better. On the other hand, there’s nothing to say that you have to slog through the writing in the most disagreeable way possible. It’s a difficult task, you might as well try to find ways to do it that don’t fight with human nature.

Part Four

Character Changes

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To recap – we’re talking about building characters. Not the nuts and bolts part of building characters, where you work out their relationship with their parents, where they were born, where they went to school and whether they enjoyed being in marching band. We’re talking about the action, the plot, the drama – how your character reacts to his story and what happens as a result. In other words, what makes the difference between a character who just takes up word count and a character who sticks in your mind for years to come.

First off, we looked at why your character probably shouldn’t want anything to do with the problems that first face them. (Check the comments for the full story on that.)

Then we looked at the art of believable decision-making. Discussing decisions brought us to the edge of this week’s topic: Character growth.

Before we begin, let me note that character growth is of varying levels of importance to different kinds of writers. Authors of novels and screenplays need to have character development if story is their primary goal. On the other hand, in many TV shows, comic strips and even, to a lesser extent, comic books, status quo is god and character development is actually something to be avoided. That said, I feel that this is just one of the weaknesses of those latter mediums in the modern era, so I’m going to assume that if you want to be one of those status-quo-cultists, you’ve stopped reading this already.

As I mentioned last week, the people we know are changing all the time, so we expect the people we see in fiction to be doing the same. Since we only see fictional characters in the context of their stories, they need to change visibly within those stories or they don’t seem believable. (Note that your story may take place over a very short period of time, and you may have to work at making that change seem believable. It’s important to think about these aspects of the story while it’s still in the planning stages.)

So what kind of changes can your characters make? Well, they might make a totally circumstantial change – going from rich to poor, or sick to healthy. They might make changes in relationships, making peace with a person they had previously been at odds with or, perhaps most commonly in modern fiction, falling in love with someone they met on the way. And finally, they might make a moral change, choosing to stop or start doing something because it is the right thing to do, or rejecting previously held standards as confining or misplaced. The best characters will make changes of all three types, although not necessarily of the same magnitude.

For example, a man might wreck a car, make up with his girlfriend while in the hospital and decide to give up smoking so he can take care of himself better (and make saving up for a new car easier). You don’t always have to tie the changes together like that, but there’s nothing wrong with it either.

What’s really important in showing changes is to make it clear that your character’s decisions throughout the story have led up to these changes. In the above example, maybe the man’s constantly avoiding talking out his differences with his girlfriend have put him under so much stress he wasn’t paying attention while he was driving. His insistence on smoking might be one source of tension between the two or maybe they’re both smokers and he’s resisted giving it up so she wouldn’t feel awkward when they were together.

This week’s example is Kuzco, the wacky narcissistic emperor from Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove, a character who showed significant growth and change, even if it wasn’t all in the most believable of ways (how did Kronk and Yzma get back before Pacha and Kuzco?)

When the Emperor gets turned into a llama he’s in real trouble, particularly with his old adviser trying to make sure he doesn’t get back to normal. And it’s highly unlikely that he’ll be able to drag himself through the jungle all on his own. Enter Pacha. He’s got some disagreements with Kuzco, and a generally better view on life, but he’ll let himself be bribed into leading the Emperor back home. It’ll take a number of double crosses and at least one blatant plot hole to get him there, but by the end of the journey Kuzco’s attitude has improved for the better and the differences between Kuzco and Pacha are mostly resolved. Now if only extract of llama could be gotten from the neighborhood parenting supply store…

A challenge for you this week is to go back and reread (or rewatch) one of your favorite stories and write down all the characters who you feel changed, how they changed and what contributed. Once you’re done, you should have a better idea what kind of stories you want to tell about your own characters.

Decision Points

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So, what do you do when you have a character who wants nothing to do with what’s going on in your story?

Well, you have to persuade them to change their minds. And to do that, you have to understand how to show believable decisions in fiction.

Step One is to come to grips with the fact that reality is frequently unbelievable. Many things that you do in your day to day life are going to look flat out unbelievable if they’re used in fiction. A case in point, every day you make decisions, both significant and insignificant, with little or no thought, deliberation or outside input. You can eat toast with peanut butter every morning for the rest of your life for no reason more significant than it’s a fast and tasty morning meal.

However, the Law of Conservation of Detail says that everything you show your character doing must be important to them. If your character eats toast and peanut butter every morning, it had better be because they love peanut butter. In fact, whenever they eat it there had better be something peanut butter based around, and they should vocally proclaim the superiority of peanut butter to anyone around. (A simple enough task for anyone who’s ever tasted it.)

Second, you need to remember the Law of Cause and Effect (sadly without a TV Tropes page) – everything must happen for a reason, and your reader has to be given a chance to see what the reasons are. That takes a lot of different forms, but for the purposes of character building, it means that whenever your character makes a decision the reader has to know why.

You probably make a dozen decisions every day without any kind of prompting or ever stopping to reflect on it or explain yourself to anyone, so it can be easy to slip into the habit of writing characters who just do something on the spur of the moment. But in order for your characters to be understandable and believable, you need to do something that, on the face of it, may seem unbelievable: You’ll need to show what leads up to every decision your character makes. (And remember, Conservation of Detail says every decision you show them making had better be important.)

That can take several different forms. Characters can talk over decisions before they make them. That’s probably most suited for major decisions that are going to impact a large portion of your cast. On the other hand, a character can take some simple action that illustrates the reason for his decision. For example, if the protagonist decides to take his group of friends to a specific restaurant for dinner, he glance around for the favorite uncle who manages the eatery.

There are other, more subtle ways of showing how the character’s decisions are influenced. Other characters might say things that later prompt the protagonist to action, things a character reads, hears on TV or on the Internet might have the same effect.

The most important part of believable decision making is making sure that the cause is in proportion to the effect. If all the character is trying to decide is where to go for dinner, a simple prompt, like knowing someone who owns a restaurant, is all that is needed. However, we’ve established that the best characters are often very unhappy with the situation they find themselves in, so the causes that lead them to accept and engage in that situation have to be much more significant.

The third part of believable characters is significant change to the character over the course of the story. If you’re sharp, you’ve already seen how these two tie together. While some changes are subconscious and gradual, sooner or later, when you realize how you’ve been changing, you have to decide if you want to try and go back to the way you are. This is sometimes called a “watershed moment”.

The term watershed refers to the way many small tributaries can join together and create a large stream or river. In the same way, characters face a significant moment of decision, usually just before the climax of a story. When your character reaches that moment of decision, all the influences that have put and kept your protagonist in their uncomfortable situation combine with all the things they have seen and heard along the way and we see the character choose to go from what they were to something new and better (or, in some cases, worse.)

As you build a character, it’s important to know what that watershed moment is, and how you want your character to decide it. And then you must gently push them toward that outcome. Not in a constant, steady advance, because that’s not realistic either. But when the time for the big decision comes, your readers will not find it believable unless you’ve shown them how it was arrived at.

This week’s example is Bob Parr, aka Mr. Incredible. We first get a look into Bob’s head as he struggles with his forced retirement from hero work. When he meets with Frozone, we’re told it’s because they know each other from the old days. When Bob gets fired we’re shown (literally) that it’s because he can’t stand a boss who won’t let him help people. When he’s offered the opportunity to do clandestine hero work, we see him gazing at his memorabilia before accepting. Bob’s watershed comes when, after nearly loosing his family, he comes to accept that they need to be present in all of his life, even his hero work.

So why does your character need to make a big decision at all? Well, that’s because it promotes something called character development. Put more simply, real people change over time. The only time we have to get to know your characters is in the context of the story or stories you tell about them. So, in order for your characters to be believable, they have to change in the course of their story.

Decisions and changes are closely related, so we’ve covered some of that ground already. But next week we’ll look more closely at what kind of changes we tend to expect, consciously or subconsciously, of a character.

Character Sketching

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Okay, so we went all over world building last month/year. Worlds are an important part of speculative stories. But I, and many others with an interest in the category, feel that they are only a part of the story, created to help us examine the important questions. What is human nature, and what is our place in the world?

By showing a world that is different we get the opportunity to show the enduring nature of the human condition in what is hopefully a new light.

However, in order to do that we need something just as important as a good, believable and well imagined world. We need real, believable people to inhabit it. Unfortunately, building solid, believable characters is a much more challenging task that doing the same for worlds. As odd as it may seem, characters can be more complex than worlds. After all, people have free will, worlds don’t, at least not in the technical sense.

So how does one go about creating good characters?

Well, the answer is, it depends. Unfortunately, there’s no one magic recipe for making a wonderful character. The things people normally look at, things like back story, important figures in a characters life, defining events or ideas, are all important but not what really makes a character come alive. They’re the ingredients, but not the recipe. The key is that we relate to them, however those superficial circumstances make them seem different from us. Today, and on the next two Fridays, I’m going to look a little at how that’s accomplished.

Good, relatable characters have three things in common. They start off with little seeming relevance to what’s going on, they show growth and change over the course of the narrative and they make believable choices that hold up through the end of the story.

Let’s look at those ingredients through the prism of the classic film Casablanca. If you haven’t seen the film before, I highly recommend it. I’ll try not to spoil anything for you here, although if you’re genre savvy enough you might be able to guess anyway.

Casablanca starts with a MacGuffin, two letters of transit, being stolen from a pair of Nazis near the beginning of WWII. These letters work their way to the city of Casablanca, where many would like to use them to get passage to Lisbon and on to the United States. There, one Richard Blaine, an American with no political leanings, a self-professed tendency to stick his neck out for no one and who can’t return to the US, runs a night club.

Rick may sound like a very unlikely protagonist to exist in an era defined by its politics and sacrifice, much less to be placed in a story about an item he cannot use. But it’s those very things that make him so useful as a protagonist. He’s just trying to live his life, without all the headaches that stem from the investigation into the missing letters brings. We want to know more about him to find out why he’s avoiding the problem so studiously. Also, his avowed ignorance of the matter means everyone is trying to cajole and convince him – meaning the audience also gets to be cajoled and convinced. A protagonist who simply runs with anything set in front of him isn’t just kind of boring, he’s very hard to understand, as his motivations and reasoning is never likely to be expressed to the audience.

This applies to any character, not just protagonists. The best villains are those who’s goals are not immediately clear, who’s motivations are so dark we do not grasp them at first and who we may not even be able to identify at first. Supporting characters are often roped into their proximity to the protagonist or antagonist, and show us who and what they are in the way they deal with their friend/employer/whatever.

In short, to lay the foundation for a good character, you have to start with someone who makes the reader think, “Now who is this person and why are they here?” After all, they’ll never connect with a character if they’re never spurred to think about him.

Of course, one of the most important parts of learning about a character is looking at how they act. And that brings us to next week’s topic – characters who make believable choices. Hope you’ll drop by next week to hear all about it!

Writing Resolutions

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Hey, it’s that time of year again! That’s right, it’s a brand new year and that means people are girding themselves up and resolving to do new and exciting things like loose weight, eat responsibly and in general make it easier to make it to the next new year. But me, I’m a writer and healthy living is an area of contractual genre blindness for us. So I figured I’d come up with some writing related resolutions instead. What kind of resolutions? I thought you’d never ask…

  1. I will maintain this blog, doing my best to continue to post on schedule, no matter how many toothpicks I break keeping my eyelids open.
  2. I will not poke myself in the eye with a toothpick. It impedes the writing process.
  3. I will try to read less garbage in my continuing attempts to understand what kinds of stories currently drive the writing market.
  4. I will read more garbage with the intent to discover what makes bad writing bad and how to correct those flaws.
  5. I will remember that finding ways to resolve apparent contradictions helps a person become more creative and flexible, it’s exercise for the imagination and every writer needs more of that.
  6. I will continue to offer shameless critique of people who have succeeded in an industry I have not yet broken in to, as well as people who work in industries I know little about. If they want to sell me stuff, they better make it a worthwhile product.
  7. I will do my level best to get an e-book assembled and available for purchase from Amazon.com, so that my work can be held up for ridicule in the largest forum available.
  8. I will add as much suspense to my stories as is humanly possible, because day to day life does not contain nearly enough uncertainty.
  9. I will add more romance to my writing, because write what you know is more a loose guideline than a mandatory requirement.
  10. I will hire a person to stand behind me with a rolled up newspaper and periodically whack me over the head yelling, “Make with the funny!” This should keep my writing from being overly gloomy.*

So there you have it. My authorial goals for the year. If you have any advice for how I might live up to these goals, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Please feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments, as well.

*These resolutions void where prohibited. No exchanges, substitutions or refunds. Use only as advised. Keep hands and feet clear. Please resolve responsibly.

World Building: Start with the Basics

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Okay, so we’ve covered original vs. derivative in terms of world building. But whether you want to be completely original or mostly derivative, you’ve got to do some of the work yourself, otherwise your story will be a flat thing in a flat world (and I’m not talking about Discworld here.) So where do you start?

There are obviously a lot of things to think about when you’re building a world. What’s the geography like? What’s the climate? Who lives there, what do they want, how old is the world and what’s the current political situation, what events led to the current status quo, and on and on. To be honest, it can be more than a little overwhelming. It’s important to keep some basic principles in mind.

Build From the Bottom Up

Start with the basic ideas. Where did the world and the people come from? Is it a colony created by Earth around a distant star in the far future? Or is it on a disk on the back of elephants, put there by bickering lesser “deities”? And how much of the world’s origin is even known to the average person? If it’s not known, what are the prevalent theories?

Who lives there? Are there other races beyond humans? Are there humans at all, or is the average person an oddity there? How much of the world is actually explored and understood by the people who your story focuses on?

Frame the Rules of Enagement

What do you want to your world to be about? While in the real world science, exploration, political theory and standard of living were all linked in their advancement, there’s nothing wrong with your distorting your world slightly to bring one of those elements to the foreground. But if you’re going to do that, you need to know that you’re doing it from fairly early on, or you’ll have to go back and make significant adjustments to bring things in line.

Also, if you’re going to have magic, metahuman abilities like telepathy or telekinesis, nonhuman races or even stranger things like lurking eldritch horrors, you’re going to need to decide on that at this stage. Adding these things after the world is mostly set can result in story elements that are wildly out of place.

Set The Scene

Choose a particular part of your world to focus on first. Choose a country (or a city or a county) to focus on first. Build that place until it’s what you want it to be, then think about other parts. It’s true that no country is an island (unless, of course, the country is a literal island(s), like Britain, Japan or Madagascar, but that’s not what we’re saying here) and as you think of ways for that your first area of focus ties to other places in the world, go ahead and write them down.

Eventually, you’ll need to think about places outside where you want to tell stories, unless you want to convey the idea that you’re dealing with one of the last places on earth or a small colony in space or something. When the time comes, don’t be afraid to go back and edit what you’ve already written about your first place. It’s important not to give the impression that everything in the world revolves around that one patch of ground. But there’s nothing wrong with having a very firm idea what one place is like before you move on. If you’ve done it right, you can actually follow the lines of commerce, politics and money from place to place until you have at least a general idea what the entire known world is like!

Establish the Core Conflict

There’s a conflict inherent to every setting. When looking at the part of the world you’re working on, find out what that is. As your characters explore that world later, they’ll have to encounter it at least tangentially, or their life won’t look real. For example, in Asimov’s robot novels, it’s the struggle between Earth and the Spacer worlds that results in the murders that Elijah Bailey must solve. Bailey’s conflict is between himself and the murderer but the larger conflict in the world around him defines those smaller conflicts in dozens of ways, including the constant presence of R. Daneel Olivaw.

On the other hand, few conflicts are world wide. It’s fine if one area has one overarching conflict, such as the local equivalent to Prohibition and the resulting organized crime, while another area is wracked with conflict between a petty tyrant and la Resistance.

Identify Major Players

I’m not talking about the characters your story will be about (although they may be in your story, and they may even be your characters, the just don’t have to be.) Rather, decide who’s important in your neck of the woods. Who runs the government, who owns major businesses, who heads la Resistance (if there is one). Sooner or later, you’re probably going to need one of these people to help your story along, and it looks much better if you can show their influence from the beginning, rather than having a major player in the military-industrial complex simply appear out of thin air.

With these five basic rules to help you lay a foundation you should be well on your way to making a decent world. Getting the broad strokes down is just as important as all the other minutia, and the one won’t look nearly as good without the other. There may be another few posts on the subject of word building, but for the time being, I hope that will be enough to get the wheels turning.