I’m running behind on everything today because I have too many meetings. I love the purpose of the meetings and I love the people I get to see, but they eat up time and energy. Today, then, I’m giving you something I wrote a decade ago. It’s a checklist for writers who are building worlds for their fiction. All fiction has a level of world building. This checklist is to help writers see that. It’s not exhaustive, and it’s not nearly as useful as some of my other work – but it’s short and it’s easy to use. It’s not the final arbiter of what goes in any novel. It’s a simple list to get you started in the thinking. Nothing more. It’s not definitive… but it may be handy.
Let me admit that one of my books (Story Matrices) is more useful and for much more extensive world building. So is my teaching. And so is the most recent doctoral thesis – it’s the most useful thing of all. It’s turgid and difficult to read… and sometimes a short pieces is more useful than anything else, because when we build worlds for novels we do it in our own brains and using our own workspace. Think of this as a tool that can jumpstart your own work if you need a small boost. It starts, as much of my work does, on using history and historical sources.
Some useful topics to consider for novelists who find themselves using history in their fiction. This is the quick and dirty overview: it’s not complete. The aim is to get you thinking about critical questions so that you can address them in your writing.
- Primary, secondary, tertiary
Basic classification of sources is always useful. Knowing that someone’s voice is intruding between you and a primary source or that the whole book you’re relying upon is a collection of studies by other people can make a big difference to how to translate the history you’re studying into the fiction you’re writing.
- History vs past
One very handy statement that many modern historians make is that the past is the stuff that’s gone. History is a narrative that reconstructs it to suit our purposes. History is not the past. History does, however, reflect what we want the past to look like. This is unbelievably useful to fiction writers, because it means we can say “We’re constructing history to reflect the characters’ view of what the past should be like.” That story component, in other words, is translatable. As novelists, we can’ write an accurate past. We can, however, write a totally amazing set of histories.
- Evaluating information and objects
No object is neutral. No information is neutral. Everything we seem touch, hear, think about is a part of our culture. When we use an object in our fiction, therefore, it’s going to be a lot more powerful if we understand its place in the culture of the world of the novel.
- Place and time
Place and time together create unique co-ordinates. Find the exact place and time for your novel and you get a setting that is strong and can play an active part in the narrative. Use a generic place and time and you are more likely to end up with a generic novel.
- Role of genre
Genre is an enormous topic. I can’t even begin to explore it in a paragraph or two. What it does is let readers and booksellers and critics know what sort of novel they’re reading. They’ll judge a historical romance differently to a historical fantasy, for instance. Presenting your novel within a specific genre makes a big difference, therefore, to how your novel is seen and interpreted. This means that the history you want to put into your novel needs to meet your target genre. If that genre has readers who are themselves very knowledgable about history, then you will need to know this and write with this in mind.
- There are techniques to translate history into story.
Telling detail is one of the most studied, where a lot of background is given by the use of a few small words that the reader interprets. The important thing is that this is just one of many tools that writers use. If you’re not sure how to write the history into your fiction, then finding out what tools other writers use makes your task a lot easier. To find the right tools for the genre you’re writing in, find novels that have the feel you’re after. Work out what tools that writer uses, and experiment with them.
- Nuancing place and time
This is closely linked toe genre and to using the most appropriate writing tools and to knowing what your audience is likely to expect. The level of nuancing you want to use and where you place your nuancing is what links all these things together, in fact. Quite often, with story, it’s not the large historical overviews that make the tale feel real and give the reader a sense of s story well told, it’s nuancing. Nuancing can be as small as whether hands are washed before eating using ewer and bowl on a sideboard or running water in a bathroom.
- Religion and world view
So many writers get this wrong and so many historians are upset. The bottom line is, however, that whether the world view needs to be accurate and whether the religion in the novel needs to be at all correct relates to what kind of novel you’re writing rather than to historical accuracy. Time travel fiction gets religion wrong much of the time, and very few readers seem to be worried about it. Know what type of novel you’re writing and then see what research you have to do.
Mind you, as an historian, I’d argue that you’ll do a better job as a writer if you know what you’re deviating from when you modernise religion and world view.