worldbuilding

Most writers pursue verisimilitude, that magic effect that sparks suspension of disbelief and gets your reader on board with the lies you’re slinging. Sometimes it’s effortless, sometimes it requires a lot of heavy lifting, but once you achieve it you can take your story—and your reader—just about anywhere.

One major mistake writers make is assuming—wrongly—that if aspects of your story really happened you don’t have to work too hard on getting your readers’ buy-in. The logic is simple: No matter how insane a story or detail is, if it actually happened (whether in your direct experience and discovered through old-fashioned research) then it will be believable.

The fact is, things that actually happened are often the hardest aspects of your story to sell a reader.

The Enemy of the Good

This usually has nothing to do with the craziness of the concept. After all, readers are often perfectly willing to accept dragons, genius criminal investigators, and other fantastic literary ingredients without fuss. The problem is the unfounded confidence that a real story gives you, the writer.

Trying to sell the reader on a magical or otherwise fantastic idea? You subconsciously put in the work. You make sure you’ve got the rules worked out. You depict it carefully on the page so the reader buys in. You think through the ripple effects and details, the unintended consequences and the cheats. By the time your reader encounters it on the page, it’s fully-fleshed and able to withstand a good tire-kicking.

With real events, there’s a tendency to be lazy. After all, it really happened, so you don’t have to work so hard. The problem is, your reader doesn’t necessary know it really happened, and you’re (probably) not going to provide them with a link to a reliable source proving that it did. What you end up with is something incredible that feels fictional to the reader, and if you haven’t done the support work to sell it, they won’t buy it.

For example, I once drank sixteen Tequila Fanny Bangers and lived. No, really.

A lot of young writers get lost in the weeds, wondering what they should be focusing on. Questions like “how much should I focus on X” or “how much time should I spend on X” often show the weakness of feedback more than a weakness in your own writing; showing your work to Beta Readers opens up the floodgates for negative feedback that cause you to doubt yourself. One reader says “there’s too much focus on the back-story” leads you to scale back that aspect in a revision, but then another readers says “I need more info on their back story” and you’re in a tailspin of revisions, seeking some perfect balance that, frankly, doesn’t exist.

This leads a lot of writers to ask about specific, replicable formulas—as if there are precise values we can assign to things. You’ll never get answers to those questions, at least not meaningful ones. You can’t say “5% of your novel should be back story” or “5% of your novel should be spent on how your character lives a normal day.” It’s even more fraught in speculative fiction, where writers spend a lot of energy wondering what aspects of a fictional universe to concentrate on—like, do you have to discuss how your fictional culture views everything, from animal cruelty to humor? If so, how many words do you have to devote to the standup comedy of your fictional people?

These kinds of formulas simply do not exist. And it’s not that hard, actually. All you have to do when writing is write the stuff that matters to you, and you’ll be fine.

You Do You

The key to writing is always very simple: Write about what you’re interested in. What aspects of your character do you want to know about? What pieces of the fictional universe do you want to explore? It really is that simple. Write about the things you want to know more about, and you’ll be fine.

Because it’s impossible to cover every single detail, and not all details are created equal. It’s always useful to ask yourself who might actually care about the standup comedy routines of your alien culture, and whether it makes any difference to your plot. Not every detail you explore needs to do plot work, of course, but if there’s no plot-relevant reason for it, and you’re not particularly interested in it yourself, then … why bother writing it in?

Writing and reading are inextricably linked. If you write about the stuff you’d want to read about and forget the stuff you’re not interested in, you’re more than halfway there.

Of course, you can always overwrite and cut stuff out in revision. Which is what I do when I write about what I’m interested in and wind up with hundreds of pages of cocktail recipes.

One of my least-favorite things is when a reader asks me a question about my work that I can’t answer. This is usually in terms of worldbuilding or character back story, and the questions are usually incredibly detailed or thoughtful, which, hey, I get it: I do the same thing. I sit there and watch Twin Peaks and I spend a truly shameful amount of mental energy pondering the meaning of disappearing windows on a jet plane, and part of that is this innocent faith that David Lynch actually has a master plan, actually knows what all these things mean, and could clearly articulate it all if he had to.

But man, I usually can’t answer the questions. Because it’s okay to be the writer and not know every little thing about your universe, your characters. In fact, it’s more than okay. It’s beneficial.

A Little Nonsense Now and Then

On the one hand, yes, you are correct: I created these worlds, these people. I am the god of my fictional universes and if anyone is going to be able to explain to you why a character wears a certain hat or makes certain life choices, it ought to be me. But the fact is, I usually don’t, because when I’m writing I tend to focus on the details that I need for each scene. I don’t worry about the Known Unknowns, because that knowledge is on a need to know basis, and I simply don’t need to know.

Until I do. And that’s the key here: Even if it never makes it into your draft, fixing every detail of your universe and character can tie your hands later—sometimes later in the same manuscript, sometimes later in the series. The fact that I don’t know exactly what my characters were like as kids, or what the story behind their tattoo is doesn’t mean I’m a lazy, dumb writer (although, of course, I’ll stipulate that I am pretty dumb and lazy). It means I’m leaving my options open for inspiration later. If I haven’t defined that tattoo today, I won’t have to retcon something next year.

Finding the balance between the right amount of iceberg under the surface when it comes to world building and character development isn’t an equation. It can’t be taught. You just have to play with the levels until you get it right. And then get comfortable admitting you have no idea why your character has that tatt. Yet.