Iterative World Building

 As a science fiction writer, especially one interested in relatively hard far future sci-fi, I spend a lot of time world building and thinking about world building.

When it comes to creating your own worlds, solar systems, or even universal empires, imagination is the limit. But that doesn't mean you can do whatever you want. Regardless of whether your story is high fantasy, hard sci-fi or even super-soft, let physics be damned, sci-fi, all world-building has to follow a one important rule.

Be consistent. Your rules, whichever ones you come up with, must be consistently applied throughout the world. If they are not, there must be a good reason. A very good reason that is, itself, consistent with the rules.

This is the crucial, guiding principle in world-building and is the difference between a believable world (even a high fantasy one) and a laughable world.

The extreme cases are possibly easier than those closer to home because it's more obvious that you're developing an entirely new world.For mundane sci-fi or urban fantasy, however, an author must be careful to clearly delineate the boundaries of where 'our world' ends and the story world begins. This includes understanding the consequences as they would play out in the world. This must be obvious to the author before they write, or they will never be able to convince their readers.

So, you have a great world-building idea, how do you make it believable?

Well, it's important to realize that the world doesn't make your story, you still need great characters and compelling plots for that. But the world will guide your story, lend its character and features to your story. If it does not, there is no use setting your story in this world. The world must be a reflection of the story you want to tell, and vice versa. Having said that, on to more world-building.

The first thing you must realize is that your idea, in it's crude form, has a 99.99% chance of having been done before. What you're looking for is a way to make it uniquely yours. For that you need to explore hidden areas, find consequences that haven't been thought of, or at least tried in this context, before.

For example, a region of floating stones. It's been done many times (Dungeons and Dragons, and Avatar come quickly to mind), yet the idea still has an interesting allure. The first thing to ask yourself is why are they there? After all, they're something so foreign to our experience. You'll start with the basics:

Fantasy -- built by ancient wizards / gods
Sci-fi -- built by ancient race / electromagnetic anomaly combined with rare alloys

The important thing to do is challenge the tropes. e.g. Instead, perhaps they are exceedingly bouyant structures and there is high density at that area, or they could be camoflaged ships, or illusions. Maybe they are actually suspended in a network of fine cables or set on invisible columns. Whatever you decide, the important thing is not to settle for the easy answer.

After you decide on the general, move to the specific. What type of people / culture lives in, developed around these rocks. Do they live amidst the rocks, above, below them? In one massive city or smaller tribes. Perhaps each rock is a colony. Were these the original builders/occupiers or did they only find the rocks.

From here you move into ideas about the people's appearance and social development and even 'secondary effects'--those less foreseen consequences of human nature in such an environment: how do they communicate? what is they driving motivation (sex, food, water, territory, raising young)?

The important things is, at each stage, to keep asking yourself any and all questions you can think of. And when you can't think of any more, ask your friends. While most of the information will not make it into the story, the more you as the author knows, the more believable the story will be.

At this stage you may turn to character and, most likely, certain ideas will come to you straight away. Resist them. The first ideas will, most likely, be bog-standard tropes. Dig deeper, ask yourself more questions on the characters, the community and what would make an intersting story in this world. Once you have an idea, ask some more questions. You will eventually hit upon that 'aha' idea that will really light your fire. Build on that. But don't stop asking questions.

In reality, the world building and story building process generally work in tandem since experienced authors have some idea of the story they want to tell before hand and are buiding a world in which to highlight issues and ideas they have. However, it's important to realize that in all other facets, the process remains essentially as described. The key thing is to never be satisfied with your first answer, always ask yourself what else might be possible.

From Ideas to Stories 2/2

I especially love reading or watching an original idea developed into a great story, which is a big reason why I love science fiction. Several such stories come to mind, a few of which came out -- or saw new light -- this year. A few, slightly older goodies (note: these are all movies).

First, a slightly older one: The Incredibles. According to the 'making of...' on the DVD, this story came to Pixar with a few similarities to the final incarnation, but much more generic. Essentially, a super hero story, where all the heroes were in the same family. Pixar, in their genius, developed the story much further, using some of the tried and true tropes (villain is created by hero, for example) but delved much more into the family side while adding their own great twist of heroes being outlawed (admittedly, this last one quickly became overdone in the superhero world, and almost all major superhero franchises incorporated such a story around this time). I particularly liked the way the kids dealt with, but hid, their powers at school, and the middle-aged, fat Mr. Incredible working for the man at an insurance agency. Overall, a strong idea made stronger by good story telling.

This year saw a UK production 'Attack the Block' released. I'll admit I debated seeing this because the characters in the trailers weren't very sympathetic and were, frankly, a bit annoying. But I did see it. And I really liked it. There were two things done particularly well in this story. The first is to take very unsympathetic characters (they mugged a woman in the first scene) and develop a story were they become sympathetic (the unsympathetic 'posers' were killed off). Even more interesting because it was an alien invasion sci-fi story, yet the character developement didn't suffer.

The second thing 'Attack the Block' did was to develop an original alien invasion story. Without giving away spoilers, it was a credit to the writers/producers to create this story line an to develop it in a manner consistant with setting--especially without resorting to gratuitous nudity. As you might gather, the story line is not 100% original, but it's rare enough to be uncommon, especially when previous attempts turned largely into farces with attractive, naked, killer women having sex with everyone.


Cowboys and Aliens, a recent movie based on a comic of a few years ago. I feel a bit bad commenting on this as I haven't seen it, so don't have first-hand opinions. The story seems inherently interesting, bringing in the ideas of aliens in the wild west.The imagination goes crazy. Unfortunately, according to the vast majority of critics, professional and casual, was that the movie (and book) stories were very poorly developed, not promising on almost any of the potential.

A movie just out which, again, I haven't yet seen. In Time poses the interesting and highly alegorical idea of time being a literal currency with salaries being paid in time, marked on your arm, and purchases being made in said time. Again, overwhelmingly, all critics have suggested that this was a great idea that simply wasn't developed to it's very high potential.

These examples lead directly from the last post and the realization that a great idea does not, itself, make a great story. Great writers will spend time analyzing their ideas from all angles, constantly asking themselves 'what if'. They will brainstorm how those ideas will affect society, then throw-out the first thoughts and dig deeper to more interesting ideas. They will also look at what have been called (by Charles Stross at the last Eastercon) 'secondary effects' of the idea. As one example, the rise of the smartphone with excellent large-screen image and quality camera gave rise to the highly unanticipated 'sexting'.

So the take home message is that, a great idea by itself can lead to a good, although more likely, mediocre, story. But with a bit more thought, that great idea can lead to an amazing story. Professional sci-fi authors will say, time and again, don't be satisfied with your first thoughts. Always dig deeper.

From Ideas to Stories 1/2

There are some great ideas out there. I'm sure we've all had dozens (or at least several) that we've though 'wow, that would make a great story'. When I first started writing, I would create a new file for each idea, keep it in mind and add new thoughts around that idea when something came to me. Needless to say, I was building up dozens of 'stories'... which, as any experienced writer soon learns, aren't really stories. They're just a collection of disparate ideas.

So, once I realized I could never possibly write all the 'stories' that I was developing, the next step came to me: I would start combining like-seeming ideas into a common story (yes, this thought was undoubtedly only original to me, I'm sure almost every serious author goes through this stage, most probably more quickly than me). At this stage things really start to get exciting as you juxtapose ideas you hadn't considered bring together before. The setting really begins to gain some depth, and interesting story twists start peeking out of the corners and introducing themselves.

It's at this stage that the amatuer writer strongly needs to revisit their characters. For some people (not me) character development comes naturally. An honest assessment of my own work suggests that I can make interesting characters, but for some reason, they are never the main character. He (and it's invariably a 'he') is flat and boring, surrounded by really interesting people.

So, once the world and general story ideas are developed, I go back and have a strong reworking of my main character and his relationship to other characters. Generally, I find all the characters have been too pleasant to each other and I need to build in some conflict and tension between at least some of them.

So, currently, that's how I progress through my story developement process. This particular process won't work for everybody, as some people are stronger at certain areas than others, but I have a feeling it is a good place to start for amateur sci-fi writers--a group who tend to be strong on world building and weak on characterization (perhaps not so different from most amateur writers?).