I’ve been a reader for over 50 years.  I’ve read a lot of good books, and some not so good.  And I’ve heard other writers talk about the craft and about books in general.  From all of that, following are some common missteps in the area of world-building.  (And yes, I’ve been guilty of most of them at one time or another.)  All identifying logos have been removed and serial numbers have been filed off or otherwise obfuscated.

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If I’m going to write in contemporary Earth settings, if I’m using a city for my setting du jour, I’d best know its geography well.  For example:

• If I’m going to lay a story in Sacramento, California, or Denver, Colorado, or Anchorage, Alaska, I’d better know which sides of the cities have mountains near them, and which mountains they are.  Same story with rivers:  what are they named and where do they run in the city?
• If I’m writing in New York City, I’d better know which streets are on Manhattan Island and which are in Brooklyn, I’d better know which direction they run, and I’d better know which streets the major landmarks are on.
• If my character is standing in a certain location in downtown Chicago and looking west, I’d better know which major buildings he’s going to see, and just as importantly, which buildings he won’t see.
• Ditto for London, and Paris, and Moscow, and Beijing, and Oslo, and Tokyo, etc.

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Animals are not machines.  Yes, an ox or a donkey or a horse can work all day, much as a human can.  However, a hard-working animal needs rest and water and food on a regular basis, just like a hard-working human does.

Although I am not a horse person, I know some, and I am reliably informed that, despite what Hollywood shows us, a horse cannot gallop for hours and hours on end.  Oh, a willing horse might attempt it at the urging of his rider, but if pushed to the limit the horse will drop, exhausted, and will most likely die.  I mean, after all, can you sprint all out for six hours at a time?  Neither can a horse.

And it might surprise you that a horse, traveling at a reasonable pace, doesn’t really travel that much farther than a man over the course of a day.

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As remarked back up the chain somewhere, major characters should not have similar names, especially if they are also very similar characters.  (The thought bears repeating.)  It might be considered a characterization issue, but I’m more of the opinion that it’s one of world-building.  Wherever you pigeonhole it, it is confusing to the reader.  I recently “awoke” in the middle of the novel I’m currently working on and realized I had two major characters named Thomas and five characters (three major) named George or Georg.  I was getting confused; never mind what this was going to do to my prospective readers!  So unless that confusion is something you need for the story, you might find another name for one of them.

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Western European culture is considered by many to be an aberration in the history of culture in the world.  (I’m not too sure but what I don’t agree with them.)  Because of this, we need to be very careful about projecting our 21^st century Western cultural mores (political, religious, sexual or otherwise) on earlier periods and places of history.

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Cloth  (This last one may be less an “Oops” moment and more a chunk of “trivial” data that you may find useful.)  I must stipulate that I am not a Clothing Expert.  These are just a few things I’ve picked up along the way, mostly from writing in the 1632 universe.

Pre-industrial societies did not have an abundance of cloth, and what they did have was not for the most part very brightly colored, or at least, not for very long.

• Without powered spinning machines and powered looms, cloth is very labor intensive to produce and turn into clothing.  (Check into how long it takes a hand weaver to weave a three-inch width of cloth.)  In 1996-7 I saw the exhibit of royal Chinese artifacts that toured the US.  They had a suit of clothing (tunic and trousers) that had been produced for a (short) member of the royal family.  I didn’t think it was all that much to look at, but according to the program notes it took over two man years to produce that suit.
• Vegetable/biological dyes didn’t produce very rich colors for the most part.  Even when they did (imperial purple, for example), they faded fairly quickly, so most people ended up wearing dull or pastel hues of blue or brown or sometimes red.  Bright or deep/rich hue dyes were usually scarce, and correspondingly expensive.  I’m told by a fabric maven that producing a good black dye that would hold fast was particularly difficult, so it was very expensive.  Only the wealthiest people would wear black.  (Explains all those Renaissance and Baroque era portraits, doesn’t it?)
• And unless a family was very well off, each member of the family would be fortunate to have two or three suits of clothes.  (Remember the size of pre-industrial families.)
• Variety was sometimes served by making the clothing modular:  detachable sleeves and collars, combined with different bodices or vests, sashes, belts, etc.
• In most pre-industrial societies there was probably a good market for used clothing, possibly even removed from corpses before burial.  (Think of the old cleaning lady’s scene in Scrooge’s vision of the future in A Christmas Carol.)
• This explains a lot about accounts in the Bible and other ancient literature where gifts of clothing were given to a guest or to someone who was favored.  (Joseph’s “coat of many colors” ring a bell?)

Cloth and clothing after the industrialization and mechanization of the cloth industry is a very different topic.  Someone (not me) should do a post on that some time.

Last post in this chain we looked at one approach to the “how-2” of world-building.  Today, just some more or less random musings on this part of our craft.

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There are without a doubt other approaches to world-building, including the “make it up as you go along” approach.

Don’t let all the structure of the last post mislead you.  My experience is that the world-building process is nowhere nearly as organized as all that post would indicate.  Most authors that I’ve heard mention the subject tend to have some degree of organization (usually notebooks or spreadsheets), if for no other reason than so they can find that decision they made six months ago.  And I know of at least a couple of special cases where a group of people brainstormed and designed a detailed story universe that was shared among them.  But that level of detail and control is probably unusual, unless you’re doing work-for-hire for TV, movie, or game tie-ins, in which case someone else has already built the universe and all you have to do is figure out how to tell your story in it.

I’m certainly not that ordered.  In fact, I tend to be very intuitive; jumping to a decision or a conclusion, then looking backwards to figure out why that would be a good idea is not unusual for me.  On the other hand, I typically don’t totally make it up as I go along.  I usually make decisions about the big obvious stuff up front, then fill in additional details as I write the story.  (Sorry, I don’t outline well.  Or often.  Or at all, most of the time.)  And yes, I do tend to carry it around in my head, only making physical notes of really abstract or subtle points.

I suspect the majority of writers are more flexible than rigorous.

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Keep in mind that every change to the starting default should have a price.  If we change one aspect of the world, what will be affected by it?

• I mentioned in a previous post that in the biological “world”, there are desired constructs that might be possible, but only with trade-offs in other areas that might be prohibitive to you or your characters.  (See Robin McKinley’s new novel Pegasus for an example.)
• If you’re going to use a magic system, where does the “power” come from, and how does it get renewed?  For the story to ring true, there has to be a cost to it.  Supermen of any type are boooooring.  But a character who pays a price–perhaps a heavy one–to do something super . . . what can you the writer do with that?
• If a character gets a super-normal ability, what does he/she lose or impair to have it?  For example:  DNA modification produces human level intelligence in elephants:  what do they give up to have it, and how do they feel about it?
• Etc.

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A few thoughts on research.

• Yes, research is necessary.
• Yes, probably lots of research is necessary.
• But “Sometimes plausibility is more important to a story than sheer accuracy.”  (Tim Powers, Soonercon discussion, June, 2011)
• Do Not do your research in other fictional works, lest you trip over another author’s missteps or “plausible” decisions.
• Wikipedia is not 100% reliable.  It can point you in certain directions, but do not accept anything it says as valid unless you know from your own personal knowledge it is correct or you have verified it through other research.
• Actually, the Wikipedia point may be true about the Internet in general, considering how many times I find the same paragraphs (word for word match-ups) posted in multiple locations.  Frequency of occurrence does not necessarily equate to accuracy of content.

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As I said somewhere back up the chain of posts, this series is not an all-encompassing list, partly because each world-building exercise is different from the last one.  You may find other items you want to add to it.  You may have your own list you want to compare to my list.  That’s all good.

If you haven’t seen it before, author Lee Killough wrote an excellent  short book on world-building entitled Checking on Culture. (http://www.yarddogpress.com/Checking%20On%20Culture.htm)  She goes into a great deal more depth than I have, and I freely confess to having learned a lot from it.  Even though it’s slanted toward science fiction and fantasy, the general teachings in it are universally applicable, and I highly recommend it to and for writers of all genres.

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