100 Things You Should Know About Writing (Part 1)

23) Worldbuilding and How to Make It Compelling

I can't believe how fast time passes. At some stage, I thought that time would crawl along while I waited for my internet to be installed. That was more than a month ago.

Well... It's almost the end of January. I'm still without internet, but I feel so bad about not adding to 100 Things (especially when I know that I've been promising this section for almost as long as I've been working on this project).

So here I am. Since it's been a while, I'll just do a quick recap. This part of 100 Things is pretty much entirely about maintaining tension. To my mind, tension depends on four things: plot, character, information release, and pacing.

Right now, I'm writing about information release issues that can have a notable effect on tension. Mainly, information release doesn't create tension as much as facilitate it. In other words, the right amount of information at exactly the right time makes plot and characterization make sense. Through that, readers are sucked into the plot and made to care about the characters. This makes them care. Caring about what happens is what keeps the pages turning, which is what tension is all about.

Worldbuilding can have a massive impact on the way a reader perceives the story and the characters in it. Not only that, but worldbuilding could even affect the plot.

There's one thing you should know, though. Worldbuilding isn't limited to speculative fiction. Yes, Spec Fic writers do lean more heavily on it, but if you write something else and don't pay attention to your worldbuilding, you might be missing something that might turn your good story into a wonderful one.

Think I'm kidding? Let me illustrate:

Let's say there's a story about a slave escaping.

That might be interesting to me, but looking at it that way, it's not exactly taking my breath away.

Now, let me add some worldbuilding. The book is set during and just before the American Civil War, in the South.

"Yes," you might say, "but you're not creating a world." 

I disagree. I'm creating the world of the American South before and during the Civil War within my story. Yes, it might have existed once (which makes it easier for me), but that's no reason for me as the writer to assume that every reader will know what the world would have been like in that place and time. So for the purposes of my book, I need to (re)create a world just as visceral and deep as I would for a fantasy novel. Or else I run the risk of losing a lot of readers along the way.

Spec Fic, Mystery, Historical... anything... Any genre needs to ensure that the reader has a correct grasp of the relevant cultural background and history of the story. Without this information, the reader might not understand certain things, such as why characters act the way they do. Or (worst case scenario here) why the climactic moment of the novel is, in fact, so important.

Let's say I'm writing a romance about an escaping slave set in the American South before and during the Civil war. Let's say he escaped and joined the army to fight for freedom. Suddenly we have lots of conflict. (If you think that this conflict is the lots of people dying, you better click on over to my section on conflict. Section 2.)

The guy could be killed in the war. Or the North could lose and he'd lose his freedom all over again. Or his love interest could be sold before he can go back to get her.

See? Conflict. Plenty of it. And the way the world was back then just inherently ups the stakes, if the writer takes the time to explain. 

Okay, so what goes into compelling worldbuilding? Well... It's actually really similar to creating a character.