Hi, it's Gabrielle! Welcome back to our Beginnings series!
Worldbuilding is one of the most exciting parts of creating a piece of speculative fiction. There are endless possibilities for creativity in crafting cultures, people groups, countries, planets, and galaxies. However, because there’s so much potential for creativity, there’s also a lot of potential for audience confusion. After all, the more you create, the more you have to explain, and sometimes it can be difficult to know where to begin. So hopefully, these tips can help you figure out how to communicate your wonderful world with your audience.
What’s Important
As authors, we sometimes forget which details are the most important for the audience to know. After all, we’ve spent countless hours developing everything from the rules of the magic system to the area's cuisine to the history of a city’s most popular bridge and figuring out how it all fits together to create a dynamic world. So the details all seem equally significant. While all of these things are important, there’s only so much information you can give your audience without them experiencing information overload, so it becomes a matter of relevance. The two most important and relevant things for your audience to understand at the beginning of the story is what the characters can do and what can impede your characters' goals.
What Can Characters Do?
This can be anything from magic to sword fighting to mathematics, but regardless of how fantastical it is, your audience needs to know what the people in this world can and tend to do. With the question of "can" it's important to establish early in the story what's possible. Especially if your main character is going to demonstrate an ability that challenges this status quo. Regardless, what you establish as "normal" at the beginning of the story will frame the rest of the events. Now moving on to the "tend" portion of that first question.
This builds off of establishing a "normal" for your world but is based more on the culture. Your world may have magic, but how does that impact the average citizen? What is highly valued or taboo abilities or applications of abilities? And how does what the culture considers "normal" impact how the character views their abilities? When considering how to introduce what your characters can do, you need to think about how your characters’ abilities exist in position to the rest of the world. Are they a prodigy, far behind their peers, or average? Is their ability well-known or something that needs to be kept a secret? These factors will impact how your character thinks or speaks about their abilities, which can communicate a lot about the world. For example, if your character summons fire with their mind but remarks or thinks about it in a dismissive or disappointed way, this demonstrates that in this world summoning fire with your mind is fairly common, but this character (and this example of magic) isn’t very impressive. But whatever the abilities your characters have, it’s important to establish early on what your characters can do and how this ability connects or isolates them from the surrounding world.
What’s In Your Characters’ Way?
These challenges can be anything from a tyrannical government to the rules of a magic school to the characters’ parents, but the audience needs to know what will impede your characters' goals. You don't need to immediately introduce the main conflict, but you should hint at it. For example, if the main conflict of your story involves overthrowing an evil king, in your first chapter your main character should face a challenge related to the government's corruption—maybe there are strict regulations the character has to work around or the kingdom's military is harassing the character for something small. This will tell the audience the challenges of living in this world and hint at the story's major conflict.
Quick Example
For example, let’s look at how the BBC’s Merlin introduced magic and Camelot. Now, Merlin has an easier time introducing magic because the magic system is incredibly soft and therefore easier to explain, but the same principles still apply. If you’re unfamiliar with the show or it’s been awhile since you’ve seen the first episode, you can watch the first scene here.
(Photo: The Guardian)
The first episode opens with the main character, Merlin, walking into Camelot. One of the first things he sees are some guards bringing a man into the center of town to be executed. Merlin stands among the gathered crowd and listens as the king, Uther Pendragon, declares that the man is guilty of using magic and sentenced to death. After the man is executed Uther announces a festival to celebrate twenty years since the great dragon was captured and magic was outlawed. Once he finishes that announcement, the man’s mother declares that Uther is the only evil thing in this land and since he killed her son, she’ll kill his son, Arthur, for revenge. Before the guards can capture her, she chants a spell and disappears into a cloud of smoke.
(Photo: Wikipedia)
In only a few minutes the show introduced the skills and conflicts characters can have and will be dealing with throughout the show. First, it shows that magic exists in this world. While magic only appears briefly, the audience is shown that people in this world can have magic and that summoning it, at least some of the time, involves chanting in a different language. There’s also the name dropping of the great dragon which indicates that mythical monsters also exist in this world. The scene also demonstrates what is going to cause conflict in the show. Uther’s proclamation demonstrates how magic is illegal and it has been for a long time, so anyone using magic is automatically in danger. This sets up Merlin’s main conflict throughout the show of trying to use magic to solve problems without getting caught. But that’s not the only conflict it sets up. The woman’s condemnation of Uther shows two other recurring conflicts in the show: Uther’s eradication of magic causing more problems than it solves and, more specifically, people trying to get revenge on Uther by hurting Arthur, or Arthur otherwise being threatened by magic wielders. With all of these things combined, the show manages to broadly introduce what the characters can do and the threats to them in under five minutes.
Putting It All Together:
Many writers struggle with and worry about infodumping. I can't count the number of times someone in a creative writing workshop has expressed concern about infodumping in their stories. But this is for good reason; one of the quickest ways to exhaust your audience is by burying them in an avalanche of facts. And even if you only focus on introducing these two things, it's very possible to still fall into the trap of infodumping because it's not about the amount of information but how it's conveyed. But there are ways to communicate large portions of information without it feeling out of place. Your characters are one of your best tools in this instance. Like I mentioned in the previous example, using character actions and reactions can tell the audience a lot about the world without explicit explanation. A pair of characters talking about something, a character reacting to an event or piece of information, or a character learning something are all easy ways to demonstrate information and how your characters feel about it. Your protagonist and their best friend talking about the class schedule at their magic school can tell the audience how the school functions in contrast to the real world, your protagonist scoffing at a news report can tell your audience about how your character feels about current events, or your protagonist learning how to control the weather can tell your audience about what the magic system can do and how it works. All of these methods communicate the same information as an infodump but the audience doesn’t realize they’re being given loads of information because it feels natural. So my advice is if you’re ever looking for a way to communicate information, find a reasonable reason for your character to interact with that information.
Every part of your world is important and it's really cool as a reader to learn about all the details of a fictional setting. But at the beginning of a story, it's important for authors to discern what are the most relevant details for the audience to join the character in this wonderful world. Hopefully these tips can help you bring your world to life on the page!
Hope to see you next week, and in the meantime, bee brilliant!
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