On Writing: Observation

A while ago I wrote a post called “On Writing: Empathy,” that was basically a one-off thought exercise.  But I’ve been thinking about it ever since.  “Empathy” was a discussion of characterization based on the massive mistakes made in books like the Left Behind series.  But there’s more to the problem than simply creating terrible characters.

In short, an author can create a wonderfully three-dimensional character.  They can surround this character with other characters who are also well thought-out and who are described in all necessary detail and who react in the way anyone would expect them to.  But that character needs to then be placed in a world that makes sense.  This, in short, creates a need for appropriate world building.

That’s a tough concept.  It’s used by those who write and discuss writing in a very limited sense and mostly left as the purview of the science fiction and the fantasy writer.  It is through world building, after all, that the speculative fiction writer creates the rules of technology or magic that drive the created world and draw the maps and boundaries of the created universe.  World building is a necessary step in order to create the necessary mechanics and limits and capacities of everything and everyone.  Without world building the characters would behave randomly and the reader would be lost.  But I would argue that world building is an absolutely necessary task in any writing endeavor.  Even if it’s completely mundane.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are writing a story.  This story takes place in your home town.  The characters go to real restaurants that exist in your town and drive down real streets to get to them.  It is, in short, your world.

But it’s not actually your world.  This world is different specifically because the characters of your story occupy it.  This is where world building comes in.  This, too, is where world building becomes an act of empathy with your character.

I went home over Thanksgiving.  I was in Glen Ellyn, IL driving down Lorraine Road when it occurred to me that, as far as a map was concerned, Lorraine isn’t any different than Lambert or Kenilworth or Elm.  To a map all of those roads are just residential roads.  To me, however, all of those roads are quite different.  They all took me somewhere specific or allowed me to bypass something else.  Even after being gone for nearly a year and not spending too much of the previous year and a half driving the side roads of Glen Ellyn the important roads were still fresh in my mind.  They might have just been grey lines on a map, but some of those roads were colored in brightly on the map I carry around in my mind.

There are other roads, of course, that I never even drove down.  To me they, too, are just lines on a map or side roads that I occasionally looked down.  To someone else, though, those roads are brightly lit, too.  Driving down that road I ignore may take someone else to their childhood home.  Driving down a road I don’t know exists may take someone else to that blue house with the big front porch where on one magical night he shared his first kiss with his first high school love.

This is what world building is all about.  We take for granted that it only matters if there are mechanics and magic that need to be described.  But world building is something much more fundamental than that and something that we often take for granted.

Consider, for a moment, that the world we live in is a science fiction world to someone who lived a century or more ago.  Hell, it’s pretty much a science fiction world to anyone from about 1960.  Everywhere I go I carry a device that allows me to gain access to the world’s knowledge at a moment’s notice using entirely wireless communications systems.  And it fits in my pocket.  Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov could have pretty much written novels about my iPhone.  Hell, they probably basically did, as instant access to knowledge was a key part of the Foundation Trilogy as well as the Space Odyssey series and the Rama books.

But there’s a problem that comes from thinking about this in the way that sci-fi writers think about it.  See, Asimov and Clarke were forever focusing on the mechanics of their technology and the societal effects of it.  But to me, as a character in reality’s sci-fi adventure, while the technology of a 3G network is interesting and while the societal ramifications of my phone are certainly something worth thinking about, my main interaction with the device involves checking my email or playing Angry Birds.  This is the essence of my thoughts about the iPhone.  I simply do not think about what goes in to the technology behind it very much because it is an integral and mundane part of my existence.

Were H.G. Wells’ time traveler to pop out of a vortex from Victorian England he would undoubtedly be amazed at my iPhone.  And my TV.  And my laptop.  And the airplanes that land over at DFW every couple minutes.  Hell, my refrigerator, dishwasher, washer/dryer, and hot water heater would probably invite amazement.  He would probably want me to explain all of those things.  But in the absence of such a need for exposition I do not give that stuff a second thought.  It is as normal to me as it is exotic to someone else.  And I give it no more thought than I give gravity or air or sunlight.  It just is.

It doesn’t matter how good a writer is.  It doesn’t matter how well constructed the world that writer creates is.  If they cannot properly convey how characters interact with their world they have not done a very good job of world building.  Or, at least, the writer hasn’t done a very good job of thinking out how to convey that world to the reader.

Often lost in the idea of the larger activity of world building is the smaller idea of building the character’s world.  This is strange, as we are usually aware of the fact that there are different ways of looking at the world.  Consider the attitudes of those who watch Fox News compared to those who watch MSNBC.  Consider the differences between a Wiccan, a Pentecostal, and an atheist.  Consider the differences between a theologian and a scientist.  But even that doesn’t get deep enough.  Someone who grew up in Tulsa, OK lives in a different world than someone who grew up in Portland, OR.  Someone who went to one high school in Tulsa probably lives in a slightly different world than someone who went to a different school in Tulsa.

This is because we all live in a world that we interpret and interact with in different ways.  The mechanics are the same.  We all experience gravity and wind and rain.  So when telling a story in our world there’s no real need to worry about that.  The world the writer needs to worry about, then, is the specific world of the character being written about.  That’s where the really tough world building comes in.  Consider all the stories written about supposedly normal people in a world that is supposedly our own that come across as unbelievable due to the lack of that key concept of empathy.  It doesn’t matter how well a writer describes a room or a couch or a girl.  What matters is how the writer describes how the character feels in that room, on that couch, with that girl.

You and I do not live in a world of endless explanation and exposition, after all.  We live in a world of experience and emotion and memory and anticipation.  To ignore this is to ignore the world itself.

All of this, of course, is not to say that the mechanics of a different world must be short-changed.  Again, part of the reason that good world-building works is because the world makes sense.  The great writers are the ones who figure out how to build that world and describe it to the audience in a way that fits a narrative.

Consider Neil Gaiman.  The plots of American Gods and Neverwhere revolve around an otherwise normal person living an otherwise normal life suddenly learning that it is possible to pull back the curtain of the mundane and see a whole other world.  In both cases Gaiman reveals that world to the reader through a combination of exposition and experience.  Another character tells the recent transplant what to expect.  That person then slowly begins to fill in the holes and figure out where one world ends and another begins.

This, of course, goes back to the bit about empathy.  Gaiman understands Shadow and Richard.  He empathizes with the their confusion and with their desire to understand what has happened.  He understands their desires and their goals and how those desires and goals will be shaped and changed by their new realities.

As such, we don’t just experience the worlds that Gaiman built.  We experience the worlds that Shadow and Richard live in.  These two places are subtly different, but inextricably linked.

On some level, though, it’s easier for Gaiman in the example.  If he misses something or writes a character who is hard to understand the reader can easily chalk it up to the confusion inherent in another world with another set of rules.  So as long as there’s consistency there’s a cushion.

It’s actually much harder to do the world building if the character could be your next door neighbor.  If a writer describes, say, a life-long Chicagoan who calls the city’s mass transit system “the subway,” anyone who has a passing knowledge of the El[1] will know that mistakes have been made.  If the writer describes a character eating Chicago-style hot dog with ketchup or a traditional deep dish pizza with BBQ chicken and pineapple,[2] you also know that the writer is getting it wrong.

The fastest way to take your audience out of the story is to create a situation where the audience stops and says, “Wait.  That’s not right.”  The easiest way to do that is to get something wrong that the audience sees every day.  And that’s why world building matters.

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[1]This is a potential minefield, too.  It’s mostly called the “L.”  I call it the “El,” due to the fact that the term originally comes from “elevated train.”  I’m a pedant like that.

[2]I’m assuming that it’s possible to get such a thing somewhere.  But it should really be against the law.