Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing
I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Creating. We’ll talk about the Storyworld of your novel.
What is Your Storyworld and Why Does It Matter?
The Storyworld of your novel is the stage on which your story plays out. It might be a room, a building, a city, a region, a nation, a planet, or a galaxy, depending on your story. Every Storyworld has rules that govern how it works. The physical Storyworld has physics, chemistry, biology, geography, cosmology. Your characters have physiology, psychology, sociology. Usually, they have government, economic systems, philosophy, religion.
Your Storyworld matters because it sets constraints on your characters. There are actions your characters can’t take, places they can’t go, things they can’t buy, ideas they can’t think. Humans living on earth can’t jump 10 feet in the air. They can’t go to Mars (not yet, anyway). They can’t buy a galaxy. They can’t know what it is to be a bat.
Constraints are important, because they create conflict in a story. Without conflict, you don’t have a story.
It’s your job to know your Storyworld well enough to create an interesting story. It’s also your job to inject enough of your Storyworld into your reader’s brain that your story is understandable and believable.
Some Comments on Worldbuilding
The process of figuring out how your Storyworld works is called “Worldbuilding.” Writers who write science fiction or fantasy or historical fiction often spend a lot of time on Worldbuilding, because they work with Storyworlds that may be wildly different from the world their readers live in.
Worldbuilding is a very large subject. I’ll leave the actual process of Worldbuilding for another day. Every novelist has to do at least some Worldbuilding. Even if you’re writing about life on planet earth in the present day, you still have to pick some part of the world to show to your reader. And you have to know what rules apply.
The rules of your Storyworld may be just the rules you’ve lived by all your life. If that’s the case, then you don’t need to do any extra work. But that’s only because you’ve spent your entire life doing the work, just by living.
If you’re writing about a Storyworld even slightly different from the one you live in, you’ve got to spend some time figuring out the rules of your Storyworld.
How far should you go in building your Storyworld? That’s a tough question. J.R.R. Tolkien went pretty far in constructing Middle Earth. A lot of what he created never made it into The Lord of the Rings. He created it because he enjoyed it. And he undoubtedly used parts of his Storyworld that he never imagined would be needed. Until the moment when his story needed something extra, and he realized that he already had built in a little chunk of Storyworld that would provide that extra something.
A reasonable rule of thumb is to build enough of your Storyworld that you can figure out what the constraints are that your characters face in any given situation. If you know the constraints, then you can throw new obstacles in their path in every scene.
How Much Storyworld Should Appear In Your Story?
Some authors choose to show just a little of their Storyworld. Others choose to show a lot. That’s a decision you get to make. The readers you attract will be those who like your choice.
But you can’t possibly show your entire Storyworld. You have around 100,000 words for your novel, plus or minus. A full explanation of your Storyworld, even as you know it, might run into the billions of words. You don’t have the word budget to show it all. You have to pick and choose.
Here’s another rule of thumb: If your Storyworld creates a problem for your characters, then you should explain to the reader the part of your Storyworld that creates the conflict. A few examples should clarify this:
In Pride & Prejudice, by Jane Austen, the five Bennet sisters are in a tough spot because the estate their father owns is “entailed”—meaning that it can only be passed on fully intact to the closest male heir of their father. The entailment could be broken only if there were a Bennet brother who signed a legal document, along with the father, to end the entailment. But there is no brother; the nearest male heir is their stupid and selfish cousin, Mr. Collins. So the five sisters can only hope to inherit their mother’s smallish dowry. They have poor prospects for marriage and worse prospects if they stay single. The entire novel is about this quandary, which is created by this one small legal aspect of the Storyworld of Regency England.
In Artemis, by Andy Weir, the Storyworld is a small colony on the moon, sometime late in the 21st century. The moon has a gravity about 1/6 of earth gravity. Because of that, it can’t hold an atmosphere, and the colony lives inside a set of connected pressurized domes. You can venture outside only in an EVA suit, and only for a limited time. The lead character, Jazz, came to the moon as a child, and her adult body was formed in moon gravity. If she were to return to earth, she’d face severe physical challenges because her muscles and bones could not handle earth gravity. Jazz is a smuggler, and her greatest fear is that she’ll be deported to earth. This is one way in which the low moon gravity affects the story. But there’s another consequence of low lunar gravity that drives the main storyline of the novel. I won’t reveal this consequence because it’s a plot spoiler. Go read the book if you really want to know. (I enjoyed Artemis even more than The Martian or Project Hail Mary, and that is saying something. I think the main reason is that Artemis has a more complex social structure in its Storyworld.)
In The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, the evil Capitol has created a mutated species of wasps, the “tracker jackers.” These have a horrifically painful sting that causes hallucinations. If you’re stung by several tracker jackers, you’ll probably die, and you’ll definitely wish for death. Tracker jackers play an important role in only one scene of the novel, Chapter 14, where the lead character Katniss uses them to get herself out of a jam—at the cost of being stung herself. While tracker jackers are only a small part of the Storyworld of this novel, the fact that they exist illustrates why the Capitol is so widely hated by the Districts. And tracker jackers are just one example of the Capitol’s “muttations.” Other muttations cause problems in other parts of the novel, and the Capitol’s technological supremacy is the main reason it’s able to dominate the Districts and force them into slave labor.
So how do you put your Storyworld into your novel? You have two options, Showing or Telling…
Showing Your Storyworld
I discussed the difference beween Showing and Telling a few weeks ago, in my blog post What “Show, Don’t Tell” Actually Means.
You can Show your Storyworld using any of the five tools of Showing—Action, Dialogue, Interior Monologue, Interior Emotion, or Sensory Description.
These tools work best when you’re trying to Show your reader some small aspect of your Storyworld. You’re relying here on your reader figuring out your Storyworld by the things you Show.
Action works nicely for Showing the reader the physical facts of the Storyworld. In Artemis, the characters can jump a lot higher than anyone can on earth. But they have to spend a lot of time putting on an EVA suit if they want to go outside. The problem with Action is that you can’t explain laws or religion or philosophy using character Actions.
Dialogue can work well for explaining the ideas that rule your Storyworld. But you have to be careful. If both characters know the rules of the Storyworld, it looks dumb for one of them to explain it to the other. So this works best when you have a child or a foreigner who doesn’t understand the rules and demands an explanation. Even in this case, beware of infodumps. It’s better if one of the characters argues that the rules are unfair or stupid. Then you have some conflict to keep the story going while you explain the Storyworld.
Interior Monologue can also be useful for Showing your Storyworld. But you can’t put in long explanations like you can with Dialogue, because nobody ever explained something to themselves.
Sensory Description can be great for showing the physical parts of your Storyworld. Again, you don’t want to do an infodump. When you Show your Storyworld using Sensory Description, highlight the things that create problems for your characters.
Telling Your Storyworld
There are times when Showing just won’t work to explain part of your Storyworld. In that case, if the story depends on your reader knowing something about your Storyworld, then Tell it using Exposition.
SF writers and historical novelists are especially susceptible to the disease known as SeeHowMuchResearchIDid. Do your best to avoid getting this disease. Readers get bored with infodumps. Tell what’s essential, and leave the rest out. And “essential” usually works out to be a whole lot less than the author thinks it is.
How do you know how much to leave in or take out? Get someone to read the scene. If they’re confused, you need to put in more. If they’re bored, you need to take stuff out.
Homework:
- How well do you know the Storyworld for the current novel you’re writing?
- What parts of your Storyworld create the conflict that drives the main storyline for your novel?
- Have you given your reader enough information about your Storyworld so they understand your main storyline?
- Have you Shown or Told your reader things about your Storyworld that don’t drive the conflict? If so, this is not necessarily bad, but it creates an opportunity. Can you use those aspects of your Storyworld to increase the conflict in your story?
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