Aunt Noony’s Five Tips for Worldbuilding

1. Decide in which world you want to set your story. As Xakara mentioned in her post, ANY world in which we write, be it the “here and now” or the “once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away” has its own rules and customs. Once you’ve decided where you want your story to be set, ask yourself some questions on behalf of your main character:

a. How do they make their money? If they are supported by someone else, how do they make the money that supports your character? Are there taxes? Tributes to pay? What skills do they need to make a living?

b. How do they live? Do they have a house in a residential area? Are they on a ship with hundreds of other individuals? Underground?

c. What do they eat? If it’s not set on earth, how does the food get there? Who produces it, and how is it transported from producer to table?

d. How do they deal with the climate? What is clothing like? What are the buildings like? Human beings are fragile creatures but have many ways of mitigating environmental impacts. Describe how your character deals with them.

2. What rules govern relationships? Is there marriage? How does it work? How do kinship paradigms work? In some cultures, for example, adult siblings of the opposite sex are allowed to be friends with one another but with no other individuals of the opposite sex outside the family. What about rules regarding children? How are children treated in your world?

3. What kinds of organizations have sprung up? Is this a simple society with clan and maybe village government? Is this a megalithic society with governments and complex politics? How do roads get built, taxes levied and collected, money produced and invested?

4. As you develop the answers to these questions, it’s useful to create a document that accompanies your work but that can be used as an encyclopedia of rules for you. You can call it what you like, but make sure it includes lists of characters and their details, relationships, government notes, and notes on anything else that you need to keep in mind. For example, if you are building a werewolf society, then you might have a section in your document called “Werewolves” that details who’s in charge, how succession is handled, what colors the wolves are, etc.

5. Do people swear? This can tell you a lot about a society and culture. For example, if you set your world on a planet that doesn’t have a Euro-American Christian majority as the dominant paradigm, then “God” or “Dammit” probably aren’t common swearwords. If you create an Egyptian society, you might use “By Anubis’s teeth” or something similar. It’s useful to come up with several options, from equivalents to the “F” word all the way down to something minor like “crap” or “darn.”

If you’re still stumped, try answering the questions above using your favorite worlds. Some places to start would be Star Trek or Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series.

Have fun!

How to Hook a Narrative Hook – a workshop with Jody Lynn Nye

Some years ago, someone told me that the author Louis L’Amour told good stories. Being young and dumb, and therefore convinced I knew everything, I went to the library to prove them wrong. I found a startlingly large collection of beautifully-bound leather books, the collected works of Mr. L’Amour. Undaunted, I pulled one grumpily off the shelf and sat down at a nearby table to prove that he couldn’t “hook” me as a reader.

When I came up for air, I was on page twenty-two.

What happened?

The “narrative hook” is what happened. When you induce the reader to turn the page, because they just have to find out what happens next, then you have successfully crafted a narrative hook. It’s that “certain something” writers can do, and do on purpose, that makes their work memorable and compelling. Jody Lynn Nye is one such author.

With more than 40 books and over 100 short stories to her credit, not to mention collaborating with legends like Robert Asprin, Anne McCaffrey, and many others, Ms. Nye in a perfect position to teach us about writing in general and narrative hooks in particular. Evanston Writers Workshop is pleased to announce that Ms. Nye will be presenting for us on Saturday, December 10th, at the Wilmette Public Library just north of Chicago, Illinois. If you are nearby, we invite you to join us. Dues-Paid Evanston Writers Workshop members are only $20 (membership has its privileges and we'd love you to join us!). (Your contribution will offset the cost for the space and an honorarium). Non-Members are only $35.00.

To register, please visit our Events page on our main website.

To whet your appetite, I’d like to share a wonderful interview with Ms. Nye crafted by my fellow Beyond the Veil author Jean Marie Ward. Jean Marie has a long career interviewing some of fiction’s brightest starts and is an accomplished author herself. If you like what you see in the interview, consider coming on the 10th to meet Ms. Nye in person. If it’s not within reach, do please stop by Jean Marie’s interview and let her know we sent you.

And when you have a moment, check out Louis L’Amour. You’ll be glad you did. I promise.

Writers are characters, too

Writers are characters, too. Which isn’t to say writers are their characters, though as the late Robert Asprin once said, “You always put a little piece of yourself in every character you write.” But sometimes their real life experiences turn out to be more extreme than anything they put on the page.

For example, Stephen J. Cannell reinvented the television game when in 1979, when he the created the only studio in Hollywood run "by a writer for writers." But to paraphrase the old ad, almost no one believed it when this dyslexic, former high school football player first sat down to type. No one imagined over 1,500 television scripts; over 35 Cannell-produced shows ranging from The A-Team to Profit, The Rockford Files to Wiseguy; and a healthy number of bestselling novels would result. Least of all the writer himself.

Before the Dresden Files, Jim Butcher once worked as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. But he didn’t like that job as much as rodeo stunt riding…until that time when he almost fell off his horse in the middle of a pick-up race and the closest thing to grab was a female rider’s blouse. In front of 15,000 people.

Rachel Caine, bestselling author of the Weather Warden and the Morganville Vampires series, is famously allergic to mammalian pets. That’s why she and her husband, artist R. Cat Conrad, keep lizards. Sometimes, she even brings an electronic version to cons, but I suspect that’s because she’s a true technological wizard and just thinks it’s cool. She’s also written first rate fan fiction as “Julie Fortune”—and sold franchise-approved nonfiction articles and books under her fan fiction pen name.

Ballet dancer and physicist Catherine Asaro sings rock-n-roll and has recorded a CD of songs based on her novel Diamond Star*. Linda Howard traces her fascination with men in uniform to her own desire to fly F-14s, while Anne McCaffrey used personal experiences of second sight and other psychic phenomena to extrapolate what real Talent would be like in the worlds of her Pegasus and Pern series.

Which brings us back to Bob Asprin. The “little piece” we put in isn’t always as obvious as it is with Anne McCaffrey, but it’s there. You probably won’t see Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden going into retail anytime soon, for example. But the targeted sales tactics Jim learned as a salesman chafed his personal sense of honor, and that sensitivity to injustice is Harry’s stock in trade.

Ultimately, every character in every story is the product of the writer’s life—an endless parade of Frankenstein’s monsters stitched together from fragments of memory we might not even recognize as our own. Like Frankenstein’s monster, we can’t always control our characters, either, but we can and should use what we know of ourselves and others to make them almost as interesting as the real thing.

To do any less is to sell our characters—and ourselves—short.

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* Totally off topic but too cool not to mention: They recently found a planet that appears to be a former star compressed into a diamond planet. Shades of Catherine and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz".

**Photo information (since I'm not bright enough to insert captions into Blogger):
The top photo shows Rachel Caine and her electronic pet at Dragon*Con 2008.
The second photo shows Catherine Asaro in concert at RavenCon 2010.
These photos and more can be found in my Flickr galleries. I'm not a great picture taker, but I sure take a lot of them.