World-Building Misconceptions: the Other Way is Wrong

Using World-Building outside of Speculative Fiction

This is in a series on misconceptions of world-building. If you want to see other entries in this series, see this link.

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There are a lot of misconceptions in world-building, especially in the speculative fiction space. I’m hoping to tackle some of them and talk, at the very least, about my opinions on these ideas. This is one of the bigger ones, and something I think about all the time.

World-building is only for speculative fiction

World-building is everywhere, in all types of writing, it’s just usually called something different. Let’s say, for instance, you are writing a literary novel set in the modern day and one of the characters happens to be a doctor.¹ You aren’t going to have to explain what a doctor is, or how they use a stethoscope, unlike if you are writing a science fiction or fantasy novel.

But you might have to explain some of the intricacies of the insurance industry, or the fact that doctors (when working in private practice) usually get worse insurance than doctors who are working for a hospital. Auntie Anne Lamott talks about how she had a character who was a gardener, despite the fact she was not a gardener herself. She spent a wonderful afternoon on the phone with someone who owned a local plant shop, talking to the owner about the fictional garden and all of the plants and flowers that would exist. Every once and a while, she would call up that owner again and ask them what the garden is doing during that period of time, why it’s acting the way it is, etc. If that’s not world-building, I’m not entirely sure what is.

The techniques that are used within speculative fiction in order to give information about the world, without bombarding the reader with two or three dense pages just on background information, can be used in exactly the same way for literary fiction. These techniques are transferrable and can make literary fiction actually more enjoyable for everyone, including the writer. I talk about some of these techniques in my guest post on Pen2Profit from a couple weeks ago, but there’s also a technique within film.

There is a fantastic Youtube channel (which just made its triumphant return, not unlike myself) called Every Frame a Painting, which did a video specifically on David Fincher.² One of the main points of the video is breaking down Fincher’s style, and how it can express itself in the smallest of details. But one quote, at the top of the video, stands out to me:

But, sooner or later, every filmmaker comes back to scenes like this: two people, in a room, talking.

Personally, I’d take it one step further: most stories comes down to scenes like this, not just films. And the way you execute those scenes, and how you drop information into the world, makes your technique unique compared to everyone else’s.

There is so much we can learn from movies on how to tell stories (from pacing, to dialogue, to framing), but that’s a different blog. Right now, I’m focused just on world-building and the fact that every story comes down to scenes, meaning that at their core, there is a similarity between stories, even if one of them takes place on Middle Earth and the other takes place in a midwestern college town.

Everyone has heard the phrase “there are only seven stories in the world”, and that the only thing that matters is the way you execute it. There is some truth in that (although I think that particular phrase is a bit reductionist and euro-centric), but what is even more true is that the differences between these stories are really the worlds you build up around them, the specificity. The more specific you can make a story, the more general the feeling of the story can be. In other words, what is different is the rules that these stories operate under.

Even James Joyce knows this, and there ain’t anything more literary, than James Joyce.

It is possible to include no background information at all in your story. In fact, short story writers like Ray Carver are known for that. But that, in and of itself, is a stylistic choice, and one with massive consequences (and limitations) on the stories you can tell: you can only tell stories that are generic enough that anyone can understand them, or people are forced to engage in these stories in a wildly different way. Magical-realism is a great example of stories that purposefully don’t explain some ways the world works, but do explain others. This can lend itself into surrealism or, worse, risk alienating your audience if done poorly.

But it is still a choice.

World-building still exists as part of the larger literary world. You are just choosing not to engage with it.

Every world, every story, has rules, both spoken and unspoken. The purpose of world-building is to explain those rules so that someone accepts them and believes them, without really digging into them and questioning. Feel free to call it something else, but it’s all world-building, it’s all explanation of the rules of your world, and it’s just as necessary in literary fiction (and non-fiction!) as it is in speculative literature.

1. I don’t know why that’s always my default example for trying to explain how world-building works, but it is.

2. In case you don’t know, David Fincher is the director behind such classics as Se7ven, Fight Club, and the Social Network.