Preliminary notes on worldbuilding

Over the weekend I started reading my first Star Wars novel, Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn. This isn’t my usual fare but it came highly recommended enough by enough trusted friends that I finally picked up a copy last year. I’m enjoying it.

What I’ve found especially enjoyable is the convincing post-Return of the Jedi situation Zahn imagines: the Empire struggling to recoup its losses, especially in manpower, and calling in reserves from the outer edges of its reach, and the Rebellion threatened by diverging priorities, in-fighting, overconfidence, and poor choices leading to bad PR. Grand Admiral Thrawn is not unlike “Hitler’s Fireman,” Field Marshal Walter Model, being rushed from one doomed campaign to another on the strength of his tactical acumen, and this outcome for the Rebellion will be familiar to anyone who saw Lawrence of Arabia or who has studied the American Revolution in read depth. (It is, in fact, the better outcome, since the members of most resistance movements end up like the protagonists of Rogue One, the most realistic Star Wars movie.)

That is, Heir to the Empire has good worldbuilding.

I hate the term worldbuilding.

It was cute as a term for what novelists, especially those dealing in fantastical or unfamiliar worlds, have to do to make their stories believable the first 10,000 times I heard it. But the more I heard it the less I liked it, or at least the way it was used—especially when it was used as a single criterion for praise of condemnation of a novel.

At any rate, Heir to the Empire got me thinking about this topic again, and I wanted to get some of my thoughts and misgivings about it down in writing. Consider the following informal preliminary notes toward a full account of worldbuilding.

As I conceive of it, “good” worldbuilding works along or toward the following aspects of a story:

• Plausibility

• Complication

• Depth

• Thoroughness

In addition to their obvious purposes—any story should be plausible, right? and “deep” is always preferable to “shallow”—the first three should all suggest the fourth.

This brings me back, as so often, to John Gardner’s “fictive dream.” I’ve written about this in much more detail before, but the short version is that fiction works like a dream in absorbing the dreamer’s attention with a situation and story that are unquestionably real as long as the dream endures. It should be “vivid and continuous,” with the reader’s senses convinced by carefully selected concrete details and nothing to distract and “awaken” them.

Gardner’s conception of fiction as a dream is key to my own understanding of writing, but if it is missing or fails to account for anything it is the strangest and most uncanny aspect of dreaming. In a real dream, we simply know a lot of things beyond the specific events and details of the dream itself. A dream comes prepackaged with unexplained context. This is often the most difficult part of a dream to explain to whatever patient person you’re telling about it: “I was in the lobby at work, but it wasn’t really the lobby, it was an airport terminal, and I was there to…”

Worldbuilding’s best and most proper function, I think, is to fulfil this role, to provide context for what is assumed by the characters within the story. Because really vivid characters will seem to have existed before your story begins, in a world that was carrying on without waiting for you, the writer, or the reader to show up.

I have two basic problems with worldbuilding as it is popularly talked about. The first arises with the verbs I keep using: seem just now, and suggest above.

There is no law governing how much worldbuilding an author should or must do for a given story. It’s going to depend on the story. A novel about ordinary people with nine-to-five jobs set last year will not need a lot of deliberate, calculated explanation. A story set in, say, the marches between the native Britons and the invading Anglo-Saxons in AD 550, or in a fantasy world, or in a galaxy far far away, will require much more. In writing a novel like these, some authors will lay it on with a trowel, and some readers will complain if they don’t.

But worldbuilding works best by suggesting thoroughness. The full world imagined by the writer should come through organically, without a lot of direct explanation, and “build” through allusive power that also characterizes and advances the plot. This requires skill and art. The infodump—which is not the same thing as exposition—does not. The writer must resist to urge to put every detail on the page. They must know what to leave out.

Pro and con examples: Tolkien is the paradigmatic example of allusive, suggestive worldbuilding done well. People who complain about the long songs or mentions of “irrelevant” legends of historical characters miss this dimension of his storytelling and read an impoverished version of his work. Robert Jordan, on the other, hand, actually does most of the things people accuse Tolkien of doing: going off on tangents, bringing the story to a halt for extraneous info, overexplaining, overdescribing, overstuffing.

My second problem with worldbuilding is that, as much as it is discussed as some special characteristic of fantasy, science fiction, or some other genre, it is something all writers of all fiction should be doing. Indeed, if they’re doing a good job of writing fiction at all, they’re already doing it. It is inseparable from imagination and good craftsmanship and is, ultimately, a meaningless subcategory of creativity. See again Gardner’s fictive dream.

Again, these are notes on the subject, not an exhaustive treatment. I may revisit the topic again soon, especially if having gotten this into writing I’m able to refine my thoughts.