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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: meg_evonne on March 06, 2012, 11:24:02 PM
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OK, call me dense, but I just figured this out. Well, a critique person pointed it out. Your thoughts? Did I jump on her WB vs BS bandwagon too soon?
Back Story can be World Building
World Building can be Back Story
but World Building is not Back Story
and Back Story is not World Building....
Know which is which and when World Building isn't BOTH, cut it and show it in another way. *arghhhh*
Both are essential, but you don't need to show world building as it should be the air your novel lives in, but back story you must include in order to tell your story. Right? or is that poppycock?
i think I'm going back to review my G.R.R. Martin and see if this is all wrong...
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Another way to put it might be:
"Backstory is what happened; worldbuilding is what is."
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I've never thought of it like that.
It sounds like a good guideline. Thanks.
Though it seemed Kim Stanley Robinson broke the rule in his Mars trilogy. The characters were always getting on a glider, blimp, dune buggy or Martian winnebago, so Robinson could spend spend many pages talking about martian geography or the terrra forming scheme. Well, except when he talked about socialism.
I've heard not to spend too much time on world building. Brandon Sanderson on writingexcuses said to focus on areas of conflict, IIRC.
Rereading your post it sounds like I'm getting confused WB- in Story is what you are talking about. WBiS is spending too much time in story talking about your world. Which KSR does in the mars trilogy but gets away with.
The WB sanderson was talking about was just spending more time building the world than writing your WIP, eg "These noble families way over here are having a Gleph-Guibelline type war and I'm spending two weeks figuring out all the players (ie copying from italian history with the names changed a bit), even though my epic will not reach this part of the globe for four more books." Maybe call this World Building-Game Master, since its the sort thing RPG GMs do.
It seems authors will always have WBGM we don't show. Butcher has all sorts of WBGM planned out eg who gave the werewolf belts to the FBI. But you actually have to make progress on your work in progress, so don't spend to much time on WBGM.
Sorry, sort of a rambling post.
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^we do them
i do back story for charictors and let them intreduce the world when are were it is relivent
i treat them sepritly
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OK, call me dense, but I just figured this out. Well, a critique person pointed it out. Your thoughts? Did I jump on her WB vs BS bandwagon too soon?
Back Story can be World Building
World Building can be Back Story
but World Building is not Back Story
and Back Story is not World Building....
Know which is which and when World Building isn't BOTH, cut it and show it in another way. *arghhhh*
Both are essential, but you don't need to show world building as it should be the air your novel lives in, but back story you must include in order to tell your story. Right? or is that poppycock?
i think I'm going back to review my G.R.R. Martin and see if this is all wrong...
Back story is what happened to the character, or is just about to happen to him. As in there's an invasion and thus the army outside storming the gates is kind of important.
But unless you're guy/gal starts out as a mucky muck, you don't need to focus on how large the great land of Meg Evonne is. Nor the king's penchant for abusing damels green skirts. Nor the Fact that Governor Evonne is building the first transcontinental magic bridge. That can all be a nice bits of world building tid bits its nicer to discover in a tavern, from ar courtier or when you are seeking a job, and someone tells you all about it in the front story, i.e. as she's living it not telling us her life/kingdome's story. Same thing for all sorts of important information that can be revealed as you build the world around your heroine as she has her feats of daring do and/or runs away screaming before being locked up as she cuts her hands on the magic glass ceiling.
Not sure if I made any sense?
The Deposed King
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it did to me but you were not asking me *shruges* oh well ;D
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Another way to put it might be:
"Backstory is what happened; worldbuilding is what is."
^^^ yep cubed
thank you all. All great comments to stir around in my brain. And thank you DK. I understood completely; doing might be harder. . .
I also plan on reviewing those other works that use WB more extensively, but I write more comfortably in WB lighter vein--so I should stop doing world dump and get off my lazy writer's butt. If it were easy. . .
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^^^ yep cubed
thank you all. All great comments to stir around in my brain. And thank you DK. I understood completely; doing might be harder. . .
I also plan on reviewing those other works that use WB more extensively, but I write more comfortably in WB lighter vein--so I should stop doing world dump and get off my lazy writer's butt. If it were easy. . .
In my experience I write a lot of info dump when I'm getting started. If you can then just cut it, and move it over to your cheat sheet. Where you put the names of every character, light back story, and important world building info for later review. I've found you've got a better chance at a good start with your now clean slate. i need that info to keep things consistent, the reader on the other hand doesn't and will actively reject it.
But everyone's process is different. remember if at first you don't succeed. Try try again.
thanks.
The Deposed King
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I've heard not to spend too much time on world building. Brandon Sanderson on writingexcuses said to focus on areas of conflict, IIRC.
Rereading your post it sounds like I'm getting confused WB- in Story is what you are talking about. WBiS is spending too much time in story talking about your world. Which KSR does in the mars trilogy but gets away with.
The WB sanderson was talking about was just spending more time building the world than writing your WIP, eg "These noble families way over here are having a Gleph-Guibelline type war and I'm spending two weeks figuring out all the players (ie copying from italian history with the names changed a bit), even though my epic will not reach this part of the globe for four more books." Maybe call this World Building-Game Master, since its the sort thing RPG GMs do.
It seems authors will always have WBGM we don't show. Butcher has all sorts of WBGM planned out eg who gave the werewolf belts to the FBI. But you actually have to make progress on your work in progress, so don't spend to much time on WBGM.
The writing Excuses crew do indeed talk a lot about sources of conflict. Finding the what, where and why of the conflict of the story elements is the way to go.
However, I personally like to compliment this advice because I feel it's incomplete. I like to think about not just what the conflict is in a story but what are the Isles of Stability.
I think of icebergs on a body of water. Conflict is when two Icebergs rub against eachother. The icebergs themselves are this things in conflict, which are in and of themselves whole objects. Something has to hold these icebergs together otherwise they can't rub against each other.
The WE team focuses a lot of energy on, "Why are people/places/things in the story arguing with each other?" I personally like to think about why People/places/things are not doing that. What keeps the story elements whole?
That's the Isles of Stability.
If you have an Evil Emperor bent on World Domination, why the heck do people follow him? If they are following him because they are afraid of him, why? How do they know? What makes someone put on the Imperial Uniform and swear allegiance to the Emperor?
If you have a bunch of fictional religions in your world, W.E. recommends you find the conflict between them. I recommend finding what brings people to those fictional religions.
A classic piece of character development is what a character wants(his goal) and how that character needs to change to achieve that goal. The Isles of Stability in this case are the Character's goal and why he wants it and why the character keeps pursuing the goal despite the obstacles in his path. When the MC gets knocked down in the ring, why does he get up on count number 7? What keeps the character on his path?
In terms of the Thread Topic of Backstory vs World-building, here's my two cents:
Tell your story in as few words and concepts as possible and gradually add more. The human brain can only have so many ideas in mind at any one time. An audiobook I was listening to (Your Brain at Work by David Rock (http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B004S3GJYQ)) explains this in more detail than I can.
What is the minimum amount of information about the world and/or the back story to understand what's going on?
What are the Isles of Stability and the Conflict between them?
The key goals in regards to presenting world-building and backstory for me at least are images to keep in mind(visual motifs, themes, etc) and what the story is about.
I had an example...but it might give people ideas...like me.
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my technique is to desisng a world, its history, etc. etc. and then pick an interesting part of that history and expand it for a story. so for me its kind of blurred.
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i use vew points to exsplain diffrent parts of the world and events going on in it
most of the intresting moden history in mine is related in one way or another to one of my charictors and there back story so they exsplain it
i have two plot lins so far its fun to wright at least ;D
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To me - Backstory, as said, is what happened - World is where it happened.
I kinda try to weave the world building, if not this one and this time, into and around
my character's story. Using their characteristics/habits/behavior to delineate some part of the world they
live in or vice versa.
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OK, call me dense, but I just figured this out. Well, a critique person pointed it out. Your thoughts? Did I jump on her WB vs BS bandwagon too soon?
Back Story can be World Building
World Building can be Back Story
but World Building is not Back Story
and Back Story is not World Building....
Know which is which and when World Building isn't BOTH, cut it and show it in another way. *arghhhh*
Both are essential, but you don't need to show world building as it should be the air your novel lives in, but back story you must include in order to tell your story. Right? or is that poppycock?
i think I'm going back to review my G.R.R. Martin and see if this is all wrong...
Too many variables in how your particular story is envisioned. World building would that the air smells of saf flowers and music as the keshni are preparing for their festivals. Backstory is why those things matter and how they came to be. The two concepts hold hands and dance but who's leading is going to depend on whether your imparting facts or feelings of the current environment. One does not equal the other, but either can be used as a tool for building the other. (Personally I love it best when both can be done with the same scene or sentence.)
Does that make any sense?
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Worldbuilding is everything in the world that is; backstory is how it came to be.
Craig
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not necercerily but mostly
back stories can be charictor specific as well
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Despite being an old thread, Im going to jump into this because I love me some world-building. Its where my stories usually start, its what I enjoy. I got started writing about the time i got started in DnD, and so the GM mentality mentioned earlier definitely slants my view. But because of that I have had to think a lot about the limits of world-building, whats its good for and where it gets in the way. Basically it about telling myself when to stop building the world and start bloody writing something :-p
Anyway, heres where ive gotten on it:
To clarify, Im talking from the Writer's perspective here, about what the writer needs to know, more than about what they actually show the reader these things. How to convey the history to the reader is a whole other conversation, and is very situational.
Anyway-
Backstory is crucial. It it what defines your characters, determines how they feel, how they react, how they experience the world. Without a solid backstory you have no idea where your characters are coming from, and so will have no idea where they should be going. Backstory is the Path they have walked. Without putting real time into developing the backstory, your character will feel hollow and your reader will fill in the gaps with whatever is familiar (usually cliches).
World-building is about how well lit that Path is. It can vary much more than backstory, depending on the tone of the tale. But the key is that you always need to know more than your readers. If you are telling a story that has a lot of confusion and suspense and an "anything can happen next" feel, a whole lot of world-building isnt really necessary, because its all situational. But thats because your character's perspective has shrunk down to immediate concerns, they are riding the moment, and long term or big picture ideas are not important. Your path is dark, foggy, and has things lurching out at the reader from no-where, and only vague shapes looming in the distance. And that can be a good story, whole genre's are based on it.
But the more your readers need to know, the more you need to have worked out ahead of time. And the more your story is going to vary from what is familiar, the more you need to present. If its a cop story on the mean streets, you can pretty much pick a level and theme of crime and let the Genre fill the gaps with the familiarities of the legal system, paperwork, IA investigations, street sources, etc. Take the same story and put it in a feudal society, or on a spaceship, or in some historical period, and suddenly you have to direct the reader instead of expecting them to be funneled naturally to what you expect. This is best done, IMO, by shining a spotlight on either the similarities with the familiar, or its differences. If its crazy aliens and a backwards legal system, maybe you make a point of the standard Cop grips about long hours, paper-work, and crappy supplies due to budget cuts; at the same time you highlight the fact that their pens are worms that poop ink and or that the only sentences are public beating, exile, or death.
On the other hand, its easy (for me at least) to fall in the trap where you have a huge amount detail in the world that it bogs down the story or you feel the need to include an giant exposition dump in the middle of some scene. This is an easy way loose readers. You cant tell them a bunch of information like that until you have given them a reason to give a damn. But by the same token, the more invested they are in the story, the more of the details they will soak up, the more they will want it, and the more hours they will dump into picking apart your work for fragments to theorize with on some internet forum. The same can be said for backstory though, you dont have a character stand up and recite their entire a life story very often, but if that life story has been a big gaping hole with a spotlight on it, then the reader will want to know, will want that piece of the puzzle.
Another thing that you gain from the time spent world-building is a sense of a bigger world. Thats not always what you may be after; you can tell a story that is carried entirely by the characters, a literary Our Town where the world is a vague backdrop at best, and the action on stage. Older literature trended this way much. <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> had a war going on, but the specifics in no way impacted the tale, and long exposition about the political pressures of the day would have been pointless. But the critical claim of <i>Pride and Prejudice plus Blood, Guts, and Zombies</i> shows that modern audiences enjoy a bit more of a complete picture; especially when something supernatural is afoot, because by definition the familiar rules have already been broken. When that happens the writer needs to step in and replace them with new rules, or the readers loose their way. So toss in other bits in passing. Mention other events and characters, other stories. Toss in a mention of the Jade court, just to make people wonder. It can be in passing, but it gives the sense of wider vista's to explore, and pulls the reader in. Part of the success of Harry Potter was in how much other stuff had gone on and was continuing to go on off screen, and it doesnt take much. The bustle of key locations, all the various historical names mentioned in the classes, the newspaper gossip. Its what turns a stage into a world. If your world has only one story to be told, it can feel small and boring. Your story should be just one of the many stories that world could tell.
It doesnt have to be a crystal clear world before page one, just have all the rules and framework outlined in your head. The rules are important to keeping a reader interested, invested, and satisfied. The difference between a successful twist or red hearing or foreshadow, and one that seems random and out of place is the framework that the world-building gives you. If your story takes a sudden left turn, but they find themselves in a place that make sense they are surprised but still with it. They dont have to see it coming, but you need to have provided enough framework so that it make sense in retrospect. At the end of the Con movie you want them to see all the clever clues that they missed along the way, not just inform them that some stuff happened off screen to make everything OK. And with anything that can be called scifi/fantasy that is even more crucial, because you have already set the precedent of normal assumptions and rules being broken (thats what make it fantasy). So as a writer I like to have as much of the world-building done as I can ahead of time, or at least some big pillars that I can count on - Isles of Stability. I can change my world as I write a book (its gets harder on book 2 and three, as things are anchored in the audiences mind)and I can add to it, I just need to maintain consistency in front of the reader. I can always say so-and-so was lying that time, or was just misinformed himself, but use that too much and they will stop believing the characters as sources of information, which then limits the writers options to give information.
One of my biggest problems is often doing too much world building and not enough character dev up front. You dont need to have names and backstories of every player that may come on the board, but have the framework. Again, this is especially important in Scifi/Fantasy because you are redefining what is Possible and what is Impossible; Make sure you actually have it defined. But its not a DnD game, all the player are in your control, you dont have to have stuff ready in stand-by because nobody is going to wander off. But if there is going to be a Magic Knight, know there are others out there, make it three if that plays into a mythology link you enjoy, but you probably dont need them named and statted until they actually show up. But if they figure heavily into the backstory, by all means have their details down. Know that there are 5 schools of magic, and that they do different things, and know their limitations. But you probably dont need to spell out the organizational structure of all of them or their leader's backstories unless it actually impacts your story. But if you mention it in a news article, as part of the backdrop, you might mention him by name instead of a faceless title, just so there are extra details floating around. Those details become hooks later on, and you will often be surprised to find you have laid useful groundwork without even realizing it.
Wow, that was quite a rant, where did my morning go? :P
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Can I just take a moment and say thank you? As writers, we work in a solitary world. Having intelligent, thoughtful conversations like this are not only instructive--they are vital to learning and keeping a writing community bound together.
You guys are simply and completely awesome! Thank you for being 'talking heads' that are so freaking willing to share you thoughts and knowledge!
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Back Story can be World Building
World Building can be Back Story
but World Building is not Back Story
and Back Story is not World Building....
Know which is which and when World Building isn't BOTH, cut it and show it in another way. *arghhhh*
Both are essential, but you don't need to show world building as it should be the air your novel lives in, but back story you must include in order to tell your story. Right? or is that poppycock?
If what this person is claiming is that world-building a) should not be shown and b) should not be there at all unless it's back story, then yep, that's poppycock. Doubly so for SF/F where you're using some amount of stuff that's not in the real world and that the reader does not know in advance; you do not just need the explanation for that in for back story, you need it to make what happens make sense. (Picture trying to write a novel set in contemporary New York in ways to make sense for someone in 1940, and how much modern tech you'd have to explain and how much you could elide. Then for someone in 1840. Then for someone in 1640. Just getting across town is going to take some worldbuilding for that last one.)
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But unless you're guy/gal starts out as a mucky muck, you don't need to focus on how large the great land of Meg Evonne is. Nor the king's penchant for abusing damels green skirts. Nor the Fact that Governor Evonne is building the first transcontinental magic bridge.
You may not need to write them, but you need to know then and think about what they mean. If you don;t know how big the land is, you won't know what the weather patterns are like. You don't know where the bridges are, you don't know how food can be transferred. Not thinking this through leads to cities of 250,000 goblins in wastelands where the only thing to eat is other goblins, and other such howlers.
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I good example I thought of was the Riddick Series (yes its a movie, but its something most people are at least casually familiar with, and its not actually good enough for me to feel bad about spoiling anything).
The first film was Pitch Black, and it was your basic space monster flick. The Characters were all more or less common archetypes, thrown together by circumstance in the wilderness. World building was limited to the idea of regulated sleep during space flight (which is common enough that the audience accepts it without much detail or explanation), an eye surgury to let a man see in the dark (requiring sunglasses to be worn the rest of the time, subterranean flying (yes, thats right) killing machines that hate any light, and a really long night of death brought on by an eclipse. All that was covered in 1.5 scenes, leaving the rest for character development as the struggle to survive kicks in. Backstory's are important for each character insofar as it influences how they will react to Life-and-death situations. But what is important is that the guy is a devote Muslim on a Pilgrimage. You probably dont need to spend a whole lot of time on the founding of New Mecca or its maps and layout, because that wont have any bearing within the scope of the survival story. On the other hand, the fact that the cop was really a bounty-hunter onn a vendetta that was jacked up on morphine for a wound the night-vision badass gave him years before... that is a much more relevant fact to the story at hand.
But then came the Sequel, and by contrast is had a lot of world-building. It had a fanatic militant religion with a supernatural leader, Prophesies and invisible Seers, and a hero from a race of super-warriors destined for greatness. Same world, same characters with the same back-stories, but that story had a much bigger stage, and so needed much more of the detail that concentrated world-building give. Unfortunately that also means more information to convey to the audience, and the flick coped out with an opening monologue that explained most of it in a big exposition dump.