Accidental Historian

Judging Books By the Title

I don't think I've ever decided, "Yes, I must read this book," based on the title alone.  But sometimes that happens.  Specifically when the book is called Night of the Living Dead Christian.

It's today's Big Idea.  And it looks amazing.

And Now, A Book Review...?

There’s a guy who lives down the street from my grandma who is growing pot in his garage.

My grandmother is utterly convinced that he and his associates are out to get her.  She thinks that they eavesdrop on her conversations and follow her when she goes out to eat.  Because, y’know, they’re druggies.

My grandfather died of lung cancer at the tail-end of the 1970s.  He was an alcoholic.

Both my grandmother and my grandfather grew up in Minnesota.  He came from Duluth, she came from the backwoods along Lake Superior, not far from a river called the Temperance River, so named because the river was peculiar for its lack of a bar where it spills in to the lake.

My grandmother was born right around the time of America’s pointless experiment in Prohibition.  I suppose it’s too much to ask that she remember the time of bootleggers[1] and Al Capone, as she spent the first decade of her life in a place that barely had roads and probably sorely lacked for speakeasies.  But to me the idea of pot being illegal makes about as much sense as Prohibition.  I don’t smoke pot.  But I know one thing: pot is a harmless drug and potheads are more likely to annoy you to death with inane ideas that only seem profound under the influence[2] than shoot you.

Yet it seems to me as though my grandmother should be thinking of this in terms of the terrible idea that was Prohibition than some idea of a bad element[3] moving in to start gang warfare around her little rural cottage.[4]  The reason she’s so freaked out can be summed up in four words:

The War on Drugs.

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Now I know what you’re thinking right now.  You’re thinking, “Yeah, that’s great, but what does it have to do with zombies?”

Why?  Because zombies are so hot right now.  I hate the fact that zombies are huge right now, because zombies are a completely uninteresting monster, yet they’re all the fuck over the place as if they’re the coolest thing since Power Wheels or Hungry Hungry Hippos or whatever the kids thought was cool three years ago (Tamaguchis?  Pokemon?  Chia Pets?  C’mon, somebody help me out here).

Now, this isn’t to say that I completely hate the zombie thing.  I loved Shaun of the Dead.  I own Zombieland on DVD.  But I enjoyed those movies because they weren’t actually about zombies.  They were about a world that contained zombies.

This is a small nuance, but an important one.  And it’s usually the small nuances that make all the difference.

The movie monster reflects a fear that everyone viewing the movie has on some level.  Of all the fears represented by the movie monster, the zombie’s is the most existential, the least personal, and in that, the most personal of all.  The zombie represents nothing so much as death itself.

Think about it.  The zombie has no personality.  The zombie has no thought.  All the zombie wants to do is feed, and in feeding, make you become the same as it.

But there are two moments in every zombie movie that define that existential fear.  You know them.  The first comes the first time the protagonists are confronted by the fact that one of the zombies is actually someone they know.  It’s a father, a sister, a friend shambling towards them, attempting to destroy everything they are.  The second is the person who gets bit but tries to hide it from everyone else.

Everyone sees death personified.  Someone tries to avoid death through denial.  It doesn’t work.  It never works.

This is why the greatest use of the zombie genre is to ask the question, “What do we do when we’re surrounded by death?”

Because there is no deeper, more profound, and more important existential question we can ask.  We are all surrounded by death.  Everyone will be a zombie some day, even if the dead never again walk out of their graves.

There’s a reason why the zombie story is usually the story of teamwork in the face of overwhelming odds.  The tough lone survivalist finds there’s nothing better than having someone trustworthy to stand next to.  The person found cowering in the back of an empty store turns out to have the courage to stand and fight to protect a new friend or love interest.

But, of course, there’s always the person with the dark secret or the person who can’t hack it and runs at a crucial time.  These are the twin fears that always bring the team to the verge of ruin: fear of that which is overwhelmingly dangerous about the self and that which is overwhelmingly dangerous out there, in the abyss.

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It’s easy enough to dismiss Mira Grant’s Feed and its sequel, Deadline.  It’s got two conceits working against it.  First, it’s another zombie book.  Second, it centers around super awesome action bloggers.

But Feed and Deadline aren’t actually about the world after The Rising left the world filled with people terrified about running in to the walking dead.  They're about the world after 9/11 left the world filled with people terrified about running in to terrorists at the mall.

It’s about my grandmother sitting on her porch, terrified because a guy down the street is growing pot in his garage.

It’s about how fear becomes a commonplace way to control people who just want to be scared.

Go.  Read it.  It’s better than anything I can say about it.

Chances are I’ll be back to talk about something similar.  I’ve spent a lot of time reading on trains of late…

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[1]By the way, correct me if I’m wrong here, but weren’t the Dukes of Hazzard bootleggers?  I mean, I know that Uncle Jesse was an old bootlegger, which makes sense.  But were them Duke boys supposed to be bootleggers, too?  How the fuck does that make sense in the 1970s?

[2]True story: I have inane ideas that seem super profound without actually smoking pot.  And I’m fucking annoying.  All.  The.  Time.  I don’t need pot to be a pothead.

[3]Of course, she was worried I’d move to Dallas and “fall in with the wrong crowd.”  I was nearly thirty when I moved to Dallas and one of those college educated professionals.  So this story is probably about how my grandmother worries pointlessly about stupid invented shit than what I want it to be about.  But I’m still going to tell it, because fuck you, that’s why.

[4]Also, too, there’s something she should be way more worried about: it’s statistically probable that there’s at least one meth lab in her area.  But for the love of all that’s good in the world, DON’T TELL HER THAT.[5]

[5]Also, it occurs to me that this now makes it seem like I’m saying that alcohol and pot are okay, but meth isn’t.  You’d be correct.  The line that makes the most sense to me is that tobacco, alcohol, and pot should be on one side of a line, while meth, cocaine, and all the other “hard” drugs should be on the other.  I suppose it’s an arbitrary line, but pretty much everyone draws that arbitrary line right there and I get the impression that there’s a good reason for that.

That said, I’m not sure how I feel about peyote, LSD, and the various other hallucinogenic drugs.  If there’s no major long-term damage, I say, “Have at.”  If not, then whatever.  But, of course, “major long-term damage” can also very easily include things like “lung cancer” and “cirrhosis of the liver.”  And, when it gets right down to it, many of the arguments against keeping drugs illegal boil down to the issue of gangs and societal breakdown.  That can be pretty much answered by pointing to the bootleggers and what happened post-Prohibition.

So, I guess what I’m saying is this: if there’s an argument out there for why the line between pot and the drugs to which pot is apparently supposed to be a gateway is both arbitrary and stupid, I’m willing to listen.  But I’m not going to go too far to seek one out, since I really don’t care about this on anything more than an academic or rhetorical level.  And I’ve got plenty of other academic and rhetorical shit to think about.

Thoughts from an Eggplant

I'm not actually dead.  Nor have I closed this place down for business.

I'm just, y'know, busy.

There are, as always, about a half-dozen things on my mind, several of which seem like they're worth writing about, y'know, the next time I have time to write.  Which is perpetually "next weekend."

So, in lieu of content, here are some thoughts:

1.  Mira Grant's Feed = awesome.  And this is from someone who can't stand the whole zombie apocalypse thing (seriously, we're up to four zombie-related things I can say I like: Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, Planet Terror, and Feed).  I have many thoughts about science fiction.  Also, I have many more thoughts about how Scalzi's Big Idea series and Barne & Nobles' Nook are in league to take all of my money.  Actually, that sounds like a hell of a post.  It's too bad I'm not one of those bloggers who actually writes things occasionally...

2.  If you can find a copy of Artist Vs. Poet's cover of "Bad Romance," do it.  Completely.  Fucking.  Addictive.

3.  My house hunt started in earnest last week.  It's officially my least favorite activity of all time.

I have a quirk that both makes me awesome at doing things like this and makes them terrible things for me to do: I don't make any decisions without getting every tiny bit of information possible, then slicing and dicing that information a thousand different ways.  It means I'm rarely surprised by the outcomes of things, but it also means that I exhuast myself.

Also, right now houses are cheap.  And I make good money.  But between car payments and the need to budget for Daisy, it puts me in a weird place where there are a lot of places I can afford, but I don't really like most of them too much.  But I will buy a house, as there's no goddamn reason for me not to.

And, yes, it will probably be a "house."  You do not want to hear my thoughts on the relative values of exchange between assessments, property taxes, and additional loan amounts.  Let's just say that my need to do a shitload of math and fill up random spreadsheets allowed me to learn a greater universal truth from the power of math.

4.  Still, once you move out of theory and in to practice, house hunting fucking sucks.

5.  I need to shave.  I'm really itchy.

Common Grace

I think of you
As a child of clay
Whatever you do
I love you anyway
The Waterboys, “Love Anyway”

Whenever I hear The Waterboys’ “Love Anyway” I wish for just a moment that I could still believe in god.  It’s a genuine belief I can only speak of defensively and with a load of asterisks, comma splices, and addenda.  What I want to believe in is not so much god, after all, as love.  And those two ideas are so far apart and distinct in my mind that to believe in one is to disbelieve, or at least disregard, the other.

I speak in generalities and specifics.  I talk around the issue.  The main problem, though, is I seem to use the wrong word.

No, it’s not “wish.”  It’s not “god.”  It’s not even “believe.”  It’s that word in between.

Still.

Back when I was still a Christian I read Phil Yancey’s What’s So Amazing About Grace? many, many times.  Well, to say I “read” it might not be quite the word.  I pored over it, combed through it, sought in its pages the image of love and grace that I found so desperately wanting in the Christian world I occupied.

In the book he speaks about being an outcast at Moody Bible Institute, a school I knew well, as I knew many people who went and even ended up doing a few things on the campus.[1]  He says he found solace in nature, in music, and in falling in love.  It was this I sought, a kindred spirit who had been blasted by a graceless, supposedly Christian world but found grace and eloquently articulated it.

Elsewhere in the book (or, possibly, in a different book), Yancey goes back to his time at Moody Bible and mentions someone he’d respected offering an alternate explanation for his time.  Perhaps it wasn’t that Yancey wasn’t offered grace.  Perhaps grace was, in fact, all around him but he lacked the necessary faculties to accept that which was freely and fully offered.

Yancey says he thought about it.  Apparently his respect for the person who asked was so great that he didn’t simply laugh the person out of the room and actually considered the idea.  In the end, though, he had to say that, no, he hadn’t experienced grace in that time.  Rather the opposite, in fact.

This is the problem of being an outcast in the world of the self-righteous.  For the self-righteous person is always correct and, at least in the Christian context, always the purveyor of that which is true, noble, right, pleasing, lovely, and admirable.  So if someone feels out of place, out of sorts, and out of grace in the presence of the self-righteous it must be the fault of the one who has those feelings and not the one who creates them.  It takes a certain strength of character to respond, “No, no I don’t think that’s the case at all.”

For one, the system itself is set up to blame those who feel graceless for their lack of feelings of grace.  It’s a feature, not a bug.  God, after all, is infinitely loving.  Jesus, after all, is infinitely graceful.  The spirit indwells those who believe and possesses love and grace abounding.  So anyone who lacks those things must lack the spirit and must have done something wrong.  Those who claim to speak for the triune god can then point out that they were doing their best and that god was obviously there because they said so, which means the poor, graceless wretch has to have rebelled against that grace in some way.

For another, it’s really hard to respond to such passive-aggressiveness without wanting to back down.  And, yes, it’s passive-aggressive.  “I was doing my best.  God was doing his best.  Why didn’t you want to accept it?” is a pretty damn loaded question.

The first two years I was out at Western I went to a church in the next town over.  The pastor of the church was a nice guy.  He was personable in conversation and surprisingly good as a preacher on Sunday mornings.  I developed a fairly high level of respect and appreciation for him even though I found it necessary to look past a few minor quibbles.  He was a young Earth creationist, for one, and possessed a detectable streak of low-level anti-intellectualism that I’ve come to realize operates hand-in-hand with Biblical literalism.

I had grown up with the sort of default Biblical literalism that comes from not really thinking about such things.  Freshman year of high school I took honors biology and already excelled at history due to a love of the subject I began to develop in the third grade.  Senior year of high school I took humanities and decided to turn my considerable arrogance about my mental acuity in the direction of becoming an intellectual.  Somewhere around there it dawned on me that Biblical literalism and intellectual curiosity could not coexist.  By the time I got to Western I had apparently called a sort of uneasy truce between the two ideas and was, for all intents and purposes, a theistic evolutionist who tried not to think too hard about the sense that theistic evolution kinda ruined the whole Adam and Eve story which kinda ruined the whole sin and fall story which kinda ruined the whole need for Jesus to save us from sin idea.

Even at that, I found young Earth creationism and Biblical literalism a worrisome idea.  And I found anti-intellectualism a horrible thing indeed.  But I wasn’t willing to dismiss someone out of hand for it, especially if they had other likeable qualities.[2]  So I went to his church and I sat in the pews and listened to his sermons.

Then one Sunday morning right after the start of my final semester at Western he preached a hateful sermon.  It wasn’t directed at Muslims or gays or abortionists anything like that.  It was directed at Christians with whom he disagreed.  I just so happened to be one of those Christians, as were several people I respected immensely, including one of my pastors from back home who I knew a whole hell of a lot better than the guy out at Western.

I was given wise council to go talk to him one last time rather than just disappearing forever.  So I did.  And among all the other things he said that day that I knew meant I couldn’t ever sit in the pews in his church and listen to his sermons ever again, he said one thing that has stuck with me.  One thing that I truly could not abide.

He dismissed Phil Yancey as one of those hippie Jesus freak types.

I needed Phil Yancey in those days.  I needed Phil Yancey way more than some closed-minded, authoritarian pastor who saw everyone who disagreed with him as an enemy.  I needed grace way more than I needed more judgment, as I had far too much of the latter and not nearly enough of the former.

I'll make the time
If you name the day
Trouble or shine
I love you anyway
--The Waterboys, “Love Anyway”

I’ve often thought about going back and reading What’s So Amazing About Grace? again.  I wondered if I’d be able to understand it now, if it would open my eyes and maybe I’ll get something I couldn’t get back then.  It was an idea that both thrilled and frightened me.  So I put it off doing it, put off even contemplating it for more than a moment at a time.

Tonight I found myself pulling the book out again, looking for Yancey’s tale of playing piano and finding judgment at Moody Bible.  As I flipped through the pages of that book I once so desperately loved and wanted to understand I found something in brief snatches, words and sentences pulled out of place and context.  And it wasn’t anything that I expected.

In a book about grace I found dismissiveness.  In a book about forgiveness I found judgment.

In one place Yancey tries to point out the superiority of god’s grace by claiming that humanism created the secret police of the 20th Century’s worst regimes.  In another he dismisses the ACLU and People for the American Way as peddling cheap sensationalism in exchange for donations.  When I last read the book I know I would have rolled right over such things without much thought.  But that was before I knew of Jeremy Bentham and before I had Right Wing Watch on my blog roll.  And that was before today, when I put my name on the petition the People for the American Way are circulating in support of Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik for his response to the shooting on Saturday.

Worst of all, though, is the taint which infects that story of finding solace from judgment in music, in nature, and in love.  He immediately diminishes that solace as being the result of “common grace,” a sort of grace that comes without an accompanying sense of god and is, therefore, somehow inferior.  That dismal dismissal of life itself saddens me in ways I can’t explain or even begin to describe.

Magic we chase - only to find
It comes from a place higher than mind
Higher than dust but only just
It hangs on the cusp
--The Waterboys, “Love Anyway”

I never believed in god.  I believed in a system of rules and regulations.  I believed in an emotional appeal to existential terror.

I suppose that if that’s all god is, then I did believe in god.  Still, if god is that thing that I was searching for in the pages of a Phil Yancey book, I never once found it.  If god is that thing the fortunate faithful around me claimed to have and undoubtedly believed they had imparted on to me, I never once found it.

There are times, though, when I hear the faint echo of something I once searched for in the words of a song.  It may only be a common grace, but that’s all the grace I need.  It’s all the grace I want.

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[1]I once saw Geoff Moore & the Distance at Moody Bible.  Just thought I’d toss that one in.

[2]For instance, if the person in question was a really, really attractive member of the female gender.  But I didn’t know a Baptist preacher’s daughter with whom I was desperately in love and who claimed that Ken Ham had some interesting stuff to say at any point during this period of my life.  No, sir.  Then again, I didn’t know anything about Ken Ham’s schtick until the year 2007, anyway.  So if, say, this purely hypothetical human being had said that Ken Ham had totally useful things to say, possibly while I was trying to figure out why the hell she didn’t believe in evolution while she was sitting in the passenger seat of a 2004 Cavalier on a Sunday night in, oh, I don’t know, October or November 2006 somewhere between Galesburg, IL and the Quad Cities, then this purely hypothetical person and her purely hypothetical belief in the bullshit put out by Answers in Genesis would have been entirely meaningless to me.

Of course one of the other problems is that people go to Christian schools or get home schooled and there is a very strong push within Christianity to not teach science properly, anyway.  I know people who tell stories that horrify me about what they learned in biology classes in private Christian schools.  I don’t regard this as being the fault of the people who were poorly served, but as being the fault of those who decided they want to maintain their privileged position at the top of a system built on ignorance.  I’ve noticed that there are a lot of people who are quick to call out those who engage in victim blaming when it’s things like, “She asked to be raped because she wore a skirt,” but who are then unwilling or unable to recognize that someone who doesn’t understand science because they went to a school that had a vested interest in not teaching science really shouldn’t be blamed for having a poor understanding of science.  Especially if they ended up as, say, accountants or photographers or in some random occupation that doesn’t require that sort of knowledge.  I can’t, for the life of me, remember any math I learned beyond basic algebra or geometry and I don’t need to go back and refresh my knowledge of sine functions, after all.

This is actually one of the problems that I come across whenever I see someone demonizing Christians for some random, hateful or stupid thing some random self-declared Christian says.  I didn’t know who Ken Ham was until I was well on my way out of Christianity, but I would have disagreed with basically everything Answers in Genesis says or stands for a decade before that.  I didn’t know who Bryan Fischer, Bill Donahue, Lou Engle, or any number of other would-be theocrats were until after I left Christianity and started reading widely from non- or anti-Christian viewpoints.  The people who I did know about – the Pat Robertsons, Jerry Falwells, Fred Phelpses, and the like – didn’t speak for me, either, and I was more than willing to distance myself from them whenever the time came.  There’s an exceedingly good chance that most of the people I used to go to church with are still in the same boat.  So I cannot demonize Christianity by saying, “Bryan Fischer says [this horrible thing] and Bryan Fischer speaks for Christianity.  Since I haven’t heard any Christians speaking against him, they must agree and they must be just as horrible as him.”

It’s the same mistake as someone assuming that, say, I let Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, or some random person at Huffington Post or DailyKos do my thinking for me.  I don’t watch MSNBC.  I don’t read DailyKos and I kinda-sorta wish HuffPo would disappear.  But even that is immaterial.  I watch The Daily Show, but have been known to disagree with Jon Stewart.  I read Slacktivist and Pharyngula, but have been known to disagree with Fred from time to time and PZ on an increasingly regular basis.  To assume that I am a mere cipher for the opinions of others is wrong, especially for those I don’t read or even know about.  Even if I am an exceptional human being in my ability to think for myself (which is not an argument I would make, by the by), I’m certainly not going out on a limb to say it’s extremely uncharitable to assume someone is at fault because of the words of another that they aren’t even aware of anyway.  That’s a dick move.

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.