Afloat on
an Iceberg:
Creating Background
By Lee Killough
Copyright © 2008 by Lee Killough, All Rights Reserved
Say “world-building” and
most writers think “alien planets.” But every story happens somewhere
and that “somewhere” needs building...not just for science fiction and
fantasy but mysteries, westerns, spy thrillers, Regency romances, and
the Great American Novel. Historical settings must be researched. So
does any contemporary location not well known to the author. A real
place a thousand miles away or a decade or two in the past can be as
“alien” as another planet. If the plot uses supernatural elements ---
elves, magic, ghosts, psychics, vampires, werewolves --- it needs a
background allowing them to exist. And of course any fictional setting,
even one close to the author’s Here and Now, needs to be developed.
Take the example of a small town. No two are alike. Fast food
franchises differ from area to area. So do supermarket and department
store chains. A farming or ranching community will have different
stores than a college town. Yearly rhythms are affected by harvest,
working cattle, or the college schedule. In the latter case, depending
on the number of town residents connected to the college, even the
beginning and end of the grade and high school year may be determined by
the college semesters. Towns in areas with tourist traffic or seasonal
sports are likewise shaped by catering to the tourists and sports.
Working out those details is world-building.
And I love it...whether
creating a planet and aliens, building a fictional town, or checking out
the history and present-day aspects of a real place on Earth. Reading
about it, studying maps, talking to people who know it, traveling there
if possible. If I cannot go there personally...thank you for the
Internet! Where Google has satellite photos of everywhere --- not
always up to date, true --- and in many cities a street scene option
that lets me pick an address and virtually stand at pavement level where
I can turn 360 degrees to see what the area looks like. The next best
thing to being there. Constructing background is like putting together
a puzzle...figuring out all the little details...the clothes, the food,
the houses, local transportation, local amusements, local slang. It is
making up the rules for a ghost, as I did in Killer Karma,
determining out how he would move around, how he could become visible to
people. It is making up rules for a vampire. Deciding that yes, he
will have a reflection but no, he cannot enter a dwelling uninvited,
because that presents a dramatic obstacle for a vampire who is also a
cop. It is creating a werewolf who does not have to worry what happens
to her clothes in shifting to wolf form. For me, world-building is half
the fun of writing the book. Never mind that most of the information I
work out will never appear in the novel.
A waste? Not at all. Think
of background as an iceberg. Only a small portion shows, those details
necessary for the story, but the unseen bulk is equally important. Not
only has it often suggested plot twists I would never have thought of in
the context of my own Here and Now, it is crucial support for what does
appear in the story. When I read a novel, I want to feel as though I’m
living in Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, or Tony Hillerman’s Navaho country,
or the ancient China of Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee. So I want my own
books to give readers the same kind of experience. Which I can’t do
without knowing novel’s world so thoroughly I am immersed in it as I
write. I don’t want to end up with something like a romance I read
years ago...and always remember as a warning to myself. Though set in
South Africa, it had so little sense of place that the characters seemed
to speak their lines in front of a blank backdrop.
Memorable characters might
have saved the book for me, someone more than the stock naive
protagonist, the Heathcliff-like love interest, and the catty other
woman. Because while landscape sets mood and sometimes becomes a
character in the story --- what would Wuthering Heights and
The Hound of the Baskervilles be without the brooding moors? --- it
doesn’t drive the story. Characters do that...and what makes them
interesting and uniquely who they are is their background.
A big part of what we’re
doing in world-building, then, is really culture-building. Culture
envelops each of us from the moment of birth...permeating our lives,
influencing us at fundamental but unconscious levels to shape our
attitudes, our prejudices, our reactions. We know it is Harry Potter’s
fate to fight Voldemort, but I think that because he was deprived of
friends and a sense of belonging while living with the Dursleys, part of
what drives his courage is the desire to protect the world of magic
where he has found friends and a sense of belonging. Judge Dee believes
in spirits because his ancient China does. In his time it was also
considered acceptable to use torture in questioning criminal suspects,
and because he is a man of his time, Dee uses torture. In Tony
Hillerman’s mysteries, Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn are both Navaho
policemen. But in Leaphorn’s boyhood, Indian children were taken from
their families to boarding schools, where their own language and culture
were forbidden in a government effort to assimilate the Navahoes into
American society. As a result Leaphorn lacks emotional connection to
traditional Navaho beliefs and looks on many of them as superstition.
Jim Chee grew up on the reservation. He embraces his culture, and feels
so strongly about it that he wants to be a shaman. The difference in
their boyhoods affects how the two think and how they approach their
police work. The traditional fear of the chindi, an evil spirit
left after a person’s death, makes Chee reluctant to touch a corpse.
Leaphorn has no such qualms. I want my characters, too, behaving in
accordance with their own personalities and background, not mine. My
werewolves in Wilding Nights are a separate species from humans
who by passing as human have survived the extinction suffered by other
hominids such as the Neanderthals. So while they live among humans,
they wear masks, hiding their non-human attitudes, rituals, customs.
Taking the wolf form uses massive amounts of energy so they have equally
massive appetites that astonish the unknowing humans they work with.
Their homes are built with walk-in restaurant-style refrigerators.
Like writing itself, there
are as many ways to go about world-building as there are authors. All
of them correct when they work. It is only wrong to skip doing it. You
risk ending up with that the South African romance...or a Star Trek
novel I read, where the Vulcans came across as American Suburbanites.
Culture is so much a part of us that we tend to be unaware of its
influence, and if a story’s background has not been fully worked out,
our subconscious will likely fill the gaps with the only culture it
knows...our own. Which, as in the Star Trek book, may not work. Or we
can make erroneous assumptions. The Colt Peacemaker and the Old West
seem synonymous, but if we have a Civil War veteran heading west in 1866
packing the Colt, Western fans will flay us. They know the Colt wasn’t
manufactured until 1873.
Being a compulsive --- some
would say anal --- organizer, I world-build by working through a
checklist of fifty-plus culture-related categories. A checklist I
developed by reading a slew of anthropological studies and seeing what
criteria the pros use to describe a culture. Though I type my notes on
a computer --- up to a page or so per category, using as many categories
as necessary (fewer being necessary the closer I am to my own Here and
Now) --- I print it out along with character biographies and make up a
loose-leaf binder for easy reference while writing. The binder also
contains maps, sometimes floor plans of relevant buildings, often
pictures of story locations if it has a real-life setting, and pictures
of vehicles the characters drive. In the case of an alien planet, I do
sketches of animals and the aliens themselves.
It works well for me, but
while other writers like and use my checklist, we agree that the tome I
produce can be all wrong for another writer. Leafing through one of my
background books, science fiction writer Jack Williamson confided that
when he tried something similar in his early writing days, by the time
he finished putting so much effort into the background, he had no
creative energy left for the book itself and never wrote it. That is
not a result we want. Mystery writer Charlaine Harris awes me because
she keeps the worlds and characters of her three Sookie Stackhouse,
Aurora Teagarden, and Harper Connelly series in her head. I know
other writers who do, too. More power to them. They all amaze me.
Still other writers, for whom the writing process is one of discovering
the story, say they make up background as they go along. One told me
that if she knew all about the book before she started, the story would
be told and no longer interesting enough for her to write it down. I
wonder, though, if the subconscious of such writers isn’t at work madly
hammering that background together beneath their awareness. In any
case, the method works for them...perhaps because they have the
experience and skill to pull it off.
Books written that way by
young writers too often tend to read like the authors made it up
as they went along. Which may have been the case with the Star Trek
novel. I feel that at least in the beginning, a writer should
consciously work out details about their story background. Which does
not have to be as involved or time consuming as my tomes. Some note
cards or a computer file equivalent may be sufficient. Whatever it
takes to help the author make his setting feel real and complete.
World-building does have a
couple of pitfalls to watch out for. Such as killing a book by becoming
so engrossed in creating the background that it turns from a tool to an
end in itself. I always watch to make sure I’m not tinkering with
background beyond alterations necessary to make the plot and characters
work. After doing extensive background research on a subject, say San
Francisco’s 1906 Great Quake and Fire, it is a huge temptation to cram
all those fascinating facts into the story and not “waste” them. Which
is why I have a picture of an iceberg prominently displayed on my
bulletin board, reminding me to use only what the story needs.
Because the story is the
point of it all, and world-building, however important, whether a game
or labor, accomplished by whatever method, must in the end do just one
thing...provide the characters with a solid and suitable place for
telling their tale.
Lee Killough’s checklist
is available as a chapbook Checking On Culture, an aid to
building story backgrounds, from Yard Dog Press
http://www.yarddogpress.com
Wuthering Heights, Emily
Brontë
The Hound of the
Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
Wilding Nights, Lee
Killough, Meisha Merlin Publishing, ISBN 189206571-1
Killer Karma, Lee
Killough, Meisha Merlin Publishing, ISBN 1-56222-006-1
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