Top 5 Worldbuilding Tips

 

Worldbuilding has the power to captivate a reader. To transport them from their everyday life to somewhere surprising and unique. It’s why I love reading and writing fantasy, because the worlds are rich, enticing, and dramatic, intriguing, brutal, and romantic. And for me, when it comes to worldbuilding, it’s both the big picture and the little details that count. 

Here are five worldbuilding tips I’ve picked up along the way:

1. Take inspiration from everywhere, everything, and everyone. Absolutely, read in your genre, that’s a given, but also watch and listen to media outside your usual sphere of influence. Podcasts, documentaries, history programs, mythology, fairy tales, the news … be a sponge, and seek out things that will force you to see the world from a different perspective. Check out science YouTube (or in my case, find someone else who has, and pick their brain!), watch people you do and don’t know, and notice what drives them and how they interact. Anything can spark an idea to enrich your world, from quantum computing, to crypto currencies, to the social hierarchies of indigenous tribes in the Amazon. Walk, watch films, look out the window on car journeys, listen to music, and don’t forget to write things down!
2. In Lean Management, there’s a concept call The Five Whys, and it works well for worldbuilding too. The basic method is to ask why five times, and within five whys, you’ve probably got to the root cause of why something is the way it is. Why does your world trade in the way it does? Why do they use certain materials? Why are the roads paved with gold? If you don't know why (at least roughly speaking), you might have holes in your world, or it might even be blocking you. You don't need to have EVERYTHING mapped out, but you do need to know the bones of how things work and play together: politics, infrastructure, magic, religion, education, employment, the economy, healthcare … you get the drift.
3. I had an amazing sociology teacher who told my class that the quest for power, wealth, and status drives a huge amount of human behavior (along with reproduction, of course). Think about how people get each of these things in your world. Is there something unique about how power, wealth, or status is derived? Who has these things now, and how do they pass from one person to another? Understanding that will help with character motivations too (especially for the bad guys).
4. Pay attention to the details, and remember consistency is key. Keep a wiki or spreadsheet to help you keep track (or a big piece of paper with all the important information. If low tech works best for you, it works best for you). Draw diagrams and maps, and experiment with what helps you most, along with what best sparks your creativity. To make sure the details work across your world, ask yourself questions from the perspective of all. You might be writing about the nobles, but does it make sense for a peasant, or a merchant, or a teacher, or a medic? Or better yet, have someone else ask you. Conversations often flush out holes.
5. Be playful, explore, be curious, and be open to “failure”. Worldbuilding should be fun, and nobody can limit your imagination. If you find yourself down a rabbit hole that doesn’t pan out, so what? You probably had a wild time exploring in your mind. Not every idea has to yield fruit, but push yourself to go further, think bigger, and be bolder, knowing that some ideas will “fail”. That’s fine. It’s part of the process. And a failure might spark an even better idea. But keep going, for a lush, alluring world will be your reward.

HR Moore writes escapist fantasy with dangerous politics and swoon-worthy romance. She’s known for pacy writing, plot twists, and heroines who take no prisoners. HR also started FaRoFeb (Fantasy Romance February), a community for readers and authors to elevate and celebrate the fantasy romance genre. 

You can connect with HR Moore (and get a free story) here: https://linktr.ee/hrmoore

Everything Happens for a Reason

World Building Tips

1. Be anti-monolith: One of the great disservices modern science fiction has done is convince some of us that worlds out there in the greater galaxy are monoliths. An ice world. A desert world. A water world. Reality is demonstrably different - and not simply because Earth has wild variation in climactic zones. Each of the worlds in the solar system demonstrate the same thing. Sure. Mars is red and dusty everywhere. But there's ice at the poles. The equator is warm. Relatively speaking. Even Mercury has wild temperature swings, from 800 degrees on the day side to -290 degrees on the night side. Of course, we can't talk about ecosystems per se, not on Mercury, but we could on Mars. If, someday, humans colonized Mars and began planting crops and trees and otherwise terraforming the Red Planet, there would be climactic zones. Plants would have to adapt or be engineered for different conditions. It's the long way of saying that while we can speak of Europa being a monolith (an ice and water moon) it's likely that most worlds are a combination of many climate types with unique and disparate ecosystems based on an evolutionary history distinct from Earth's.

2. Cultures develop in concert with the evolution of a species: Human culture developed concurrently as humans developed. As an example, caring for the dead is used as a hallmark of culture and is usually attributed to the Neanderthal about 130 thousand years ago. Recently, the discovery of Homo naledi in South Africa pushed the evidence for deliberate burial back to about 225 thousand years ago. The point being that sentient creatures being organizing into societies far earlier than most of us imagine. If a culture in your world does a particular thing, it's likely they've doing the thing far longer than you or your main characters think. It's a great point of conflict if an outsider comes in trying to change some long-held cultural activity. It's an even stronger conflict for someone within the culture to challenge long-standing tradition.

3. Culture often develops in the direction of evolution: This specifically means that when a culture adopts a practice, it is because the practice confers either sexual advantage or survival advantage. Bonus if it's both. If someone within my made up culture takes up regular bathing, they're might gain reproductive advantage because they don't smell or because keeping clean prevents infection giving them more chances to reproduce over time. Another long way of saying that in world building, everything needs to happen for a reason.

Even though the book has been out for several years, I will always recommend Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies-ebook/dp/B06X1CT33R) . It is the how-to book on world building because it breaks down the how earth societies and cultures developed. Why some cultures seemed to conquer the world, while other cultures sank into oblivion or where wiped out. It a very handy book in helping prompt world builders to consider how illness, domesticating animals, and developing agriculture changed the shape of humans and of human culture and at what price.

Maybe that's the final piece of world building advice: Everything has a price tag. Magic. Culture. Disrupting culture. Art. Religion. You get to decide what the price tag if for each of those. Even if you're creating your own world from scratch, the laws of physics still apply. The law of conservation of energy suggests that for every expenditure of energy for something like magic, there's an equal and opposite reaction somewhere else. You get to decide what and where.

World Building...Don'ts

Oh man, my fellow SFF Seveners have had some excellent posts sharing their Top 5 World-Building Tips. How do I add to that??

#1: Should I craft a brand new language, a-la-Tolkien? It could be a spin off of dwarvish with a little Orc thrown in and I could put together an entire dictionary with phonetics…Wait….

#2: Maybe I’ll start with a Venn diagram of all the different types of magic in my book’s world. Similarities, differences, strengths, weaknesses, uses, taboos—which leads to a spreadsheet of who uses what and where and how along with character specific phrases and quirks that occur when they use magic. Maybe there should be colors involved, or at least a color coordinated spreadsheet, that will help when I compare my magic system to some of the classics out there…but…

#3: The classics all have history! I need to world-build with extensive history!! My characters will be able to trace their ancestry back hundreds of years. Classics always hide a spy or assassin in the ancestry, someone way-back-when that changed the tide of a monarchy—in that case I need all the details on how that monarchy was built and run, foils and successes, heroes and villains…

#4: Villain names, as well as the heroes, should have meaning that is reflected in the plot line of the story. Which means research time! There are oodles of Pinterest boards to get you in the perfect villain mood. And you like that one blue cape that has a slight silver sheen to it? Well, it’s your lucky day because there’s a shop in California that makes them and, what, there’s this Insta account that has gorgeous pictures of costumes in jaw dropping places…

#5: MAPS! How will the characters know where to go if there’s no map! There will be a current time map which connects to all the maps of the adjoining countries and all of those maps will have ancient maps because what hero doesn’t stumble upon a near-disintegrating map and have to make a calculated guess as to their current time translation….

Yeah….let’s just say Jeffe had it right when she said your book is the tip of an iceberg, not the entire iceberg. If you put the time and effort into writing the entire iceberg on paper(screen) you’ll log countless hours…and then you’ll still have to write the story. 

Don’t get bogged down, my friends! Happy Writing!

Lead Me Into Your World, But Don't Drown Me In It

 

This week we're sharing our Top 5 World-Building Tips. Firstly, ditto what Charissa suggested in Sunday's post. Secondly, since I love you, dear readers, I'll add some other tips that I've learned through rejection and correction, aka, the hard way (eyes stories that will never see the light of day...for good reasons).

1. Lead Me Slowly into The Dream: When introducing your world, particularly in fantasy and sci-fi, give the reader something real-world-relatable before rolling out your special crazy. It can be as simple as the scent of fresh bread on a breeze or the clatter of wheels on cobblestones or a pebble in a shoe. It's super tempting to dump all the "how your world is not the real world" right at the beginning because of your excitement to show the reader how amazingly different everything is. Resist. Think of the introduction like greeting a wary puppy. Show them something familiar, then, when they're comfortable, encourage them to follow you. Along the way, toss in an element of Other here and there, feeding them small bits until they're immersed. This is how you avoid info dumping your setting and overwhelming the reader. Once you have the reader's trust, they'll walk around your world with wonder.

2. For All The Suns in the Sky and Moons in the Sea: When creating your environment--as in climate, terrain, etc.-- consider the macro impacts of what you're making. Two moons in your world? How does that affect the tides? Does night last longer than day? How does that affect farming and food supply? What about light sources? Does it rain a lot or are most days clear skies? How does that affect water supply? Rivers? Seas? Transportation? Food supply? Is it windy in your world? Gentle breezes? Gales? How does that affect temperature? Circulation of fresh air? Is illness common because of stagnation? How has fashion adapted to accommodate frequent gusts? How are weapons modified so they don't blow off course?

3. The Consequences of History Live On: Whether the Great War™ was long ago or still unfolding, how does that show up in architecture? In the ways people get from Point A to Point B? In the sourcing of supplies as ordinary as underwear or as rare as magic stones? What measures of defense are so integrated into everyday life that no one questions them? Does all dinnerware come with toxin-detection coating since the groundwater was poisoned by The Enemy? What lingering scarcity remains a problem for national prosperity? Did The Enemy salt the ground? Blacken the sky? Cast a curse that no fire can exist, anywhere, ever, no matter how small? How does your world compensate for their man (or monster) made disadvantages? The consequences of your world's history should be reflected in more than the persecution of race(s) or magic(s). 

4. What Is Joy? We all know it's the small things, the minor acts that provide contentment. Too often, we the authors are so busy building conflict that we forget to demonstrate our characters experiencing joy. Happiness comes from more than interactions with other sentient characters, it also comes in private moments with nature or through connecting to The Greater Consciousness. How do people of your world experience joy? What are the minor acts? What are the great moments? What joy is personal and what is communal? What is performative and what is soul-nurturing? To balance angst, there must be joy.

5. For All The Secrets I Hold: If you're an analytical person like me, odds are you know far too many details of your world that...don't need to be mentioned in the book. Akin to character backstories that we know and readers never will, there is such a thing as TMI in world-building. Unless plumbing is plot-important, most readers don't care to know about the sewage systems. Same for the communication network of trees if your story is in space or ultra-urban. Ditto the complete pantheon when only one or two deities are involved.  

Top 5 Worldbuilding Tips

Worldbuilding! What's in a world? A LOT. Ultimately, you can read posts like this all day, but many ideas might not come to you until you sit down and start writing. Still, there are plenty of things to think about beforehand, especially if you require a solid foundation before you start writing a story. Here are a few things that rumble around my brain when it comes to creating worlds.

1. Think about your magic system. This one is hard for me, because I don't know all the bits and pieces of my world until I write the book. Then I go back with knowledge in-hand and revise. But you still need a general idea of the rules of your magic system, its limits and costs, and its availability across your world. Just remember that too much planning on this part can possibly create boundaries that come at an expense to the story. So a little freedom might help.
2. Language: And I don't mean spoken language, although that's a given. In my novel, The Witch Collector, the ancient language is Elikesh. It's spoken completely different from the common tongue. It's also how the witches in my story create magick, and my heroine, who was born with the inability to speak, uses a hang language to communicate AND build her magick. So yes, language in that sense is critical to grasp. But also your story language. Consistency and uniqueness. Words that make your story YOURS and not like everything else. I have a background in history, so I pull from that knowledge for setting and word choice. I wanted my books to feel familiar and yet foreign at the same time. Word choice is so important. I can't stress it enough. Pay attention to those types of details when you read other books. They're what make a world come to life. Don't call it a glass bottle if it can be a cruet. That type of thing.
3. History and Lore: Every culture has a history and their own lore. Consider what your world's history and lore and legends might be. A fun exercise is to sit down and put yourself in your main character's shoes and point blank ask them what their world was like 100 years ago, 500, 1000. And just free write. It's an amazing experiment. Your brain will likely give you a great background to begin with.
4. Religion, Society, and Politics: Who worships who? Who doesn't worship at all? What is society like at large? How do people trade, source food, clothes, etc? What are the world's politics? Who rules? How do they rule? This list can be long, and again, I advise letting your creativity guide you after you have a fairly solid understanding of how the world works.
5. Consider diversity. Writing a diverse world can be a little intimidating, because if you're like me, you don't want to do any harm. You want the world in your stories to look like the one you live in, but more so, like the world you WISHED you lived in. We CAN create worlds with cultural, sexual, and gender diversity, we just need to do it well. In my fiction, I write characters of all stripes, and I wanted to have a world where being something other than cishet isn't taboo or sinful or any other negative labels that get painted on members of the LGBTQ+ community in our everyday life. Instead, they live, love, and fight like everyone else, and everyone else thinks nothing of who they kiss or don't kiss at night. Being LGBTQ+ is part of the norm instead of the exception, and it's respected. I also color my world. And again, I don't make being white the default. If you only ever describe the skin tone of people of color, then you're actively saying that white is the default and needs no clarification. So be careful, do your research, and use sensitivity readers, but please consider diversity.

Good luck and have FUN! 

~ Charissa

Writing rules for your sci-fi/fantasy worlds

Rules…rules…rules were meant to be broken? 

Close, but our topic of the week is: What’s a rule of your world established in a precious book that complicated things for you later on?

And I consider myself lucky in this because so far I’ve only written books numbered one! But I’m aware of the danger of writing yourself into a tight corner because of world building/magic system, yes that came from Jeffe and her oh-so-handy posts over the years..and again this Sunday.

So I’ve used that advice…but mostly for my fantasy books because my sci-fi books I write as stand alones. Anyone out there write in different genres and treat the world building differently? 

For my fantasy books, one is Regency fantasy and the other is high fantasy.

High Fantasy: stories that take place in a completely fictional world with its own rules.

Regency fantasy is basically a historical with some magic thrown in. That meant I had to trade world building with historical research. Rabbit hole alert! Then the magic came into play and it was fantastic! Difficult physical challenges, magic! Weapons that met their mark as long as you’re close, magic! Clandestine meetings cracked by eavesdropping wind, magic! 

But all the while I already knew what would happen in book two and mostly in book three. Since I knew the future (ha! if only) I could work in hints and abilities/restrictions that I needed for book two. 

I used the same guidelines when world building my high fantasy. The magic system for this series took a year to formulate and over that year it morphed, like it was alive. Which it is, in the books. And like the Regency fantasy I already knew what would happen for my heroes and villains in book two so some of the secondary character’s magical abilities are the basis for the various main characters to come. 

After thinking about all of this I’m wondering what would happen if I wrote a book one without knowing anything about book two! I listened to Jeffe’s June 5th First Cup of Coffee where she interviewed author Grace Draven. During their coffee date Grace mentioned she wrote Phoenix Unbound without knowing what book two, Dragon Unleashed, would be. 

That blew my mind. I don’t—I don’t know if my brain could handle writing like that. Thank goodness for the beauty of this craft, that each of our paths are different and how we go about writing is different. And who knows, I could find myself in that predicament someday…and then I might have to borrow Jeffe’s tactic and lie my way out.

Too bad I’m not a proficient lier.

Retconning and the Reader Contract

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is "Channeling JK Rowling: Any apologies due your readers for the way you treated a character?"

I'm not sure exactly what the person who suggested this topic had in mind so far as apologies to readers for how she treated characters. Likely this is because I've never been a huge Harry Potter fan.

*gasp*

I know - anathema.

Thing is, I was an adult when HP came out and even my stepkids were old for the books. I did read the first two - mostly to grok the phenom - but as someone who'd read every fantasy and fairy tale book I could lay my hands on, I found the stories pretty derivative. They never quite lit me up. Just a me thing. So I don't really know, outside of things I occasionally hear people mention - something about the red-headed family? - what terrible things Rowling did to her characters.

I *do* however find it very interesting to observe the kinds of retconning Rowling has been engaged in. Retcon stands for "retroactive continuity" - which is to "revise (an aspect of a fictional work) retrospectively, typically by introducing a piece of new information that imposes a different interpretation on previously described events."

For those not in the know, Rowling has made various announcements about characters that very much change interpretations of events in the books. For example, saying that a major character is gay and had a homosexual relationship with another character - when there's no evidence of it in the actual books. Fans aren't bothered by this reveal so much (with some homophobic exceptions, of course), but it's problematic because the author claims "oh, I have these gay characters" without having to deal with really representing them in the story.

Also, for those readers who LOVE the books, these kinds of retcons change the stories in dramatic ways. One of my friends in the publishing industry said to me, "Every time she tweets something new, we're all PLEASE JUST STOP." (Paraphrasing there.)

It's fascinating from an author perspective, too, because one thing that we deal with - especially SFF authors - is worldbuilding. In order to define a fantasy or science fiction world, we establish rules. Sometimes we box ourselves into corners storywise with those rules, which can result in much gnashing of teeth. BUT, we abide by the rules we set up. Anything else is a betrayal of the contract with the reader.

My writer friend Jim Sorensen shared this excellent article from Tor.com with me. It explores what we do when we create fictional universes - and what obligations we have not to continue to fiddle with them.

I suppose my take is that I'd rather create an entirely new world than tweak a previous one. That way I won't owe any of my readers apologies.

At least not for that.

Um, it's *all* world-building?

This week, we're talking about time management in general and specifically how much time world-building gets in the schedule versus actual word-making time. And to that I say... uh, I have no idea.

My process is very organic. I write a ton of scenes, read a ton of researchy things, make notes, write dialogue in Sharpie on my arms, listen to a ton of mood music, and eventually the story inhabits my brain and I can't not tell it. I fall in love with the characters. They start talking to me. I do mean things to them. It's a party!

World-building happens somewhere in there. Or maybe everywhere in there. There is no boundary, for me, between world-building and writing. The story is the world is the story is the characters. If I start separating those out as discrete items, I lose the big picture brain denizen Sharpie-written fugue of awesomeness. This is the same reason I can't do those character interview doodads before I write the story.

Because for the story, it doesn't matter that my protagonist has brown eyes or that her society uses a barter system instead of currency or that the planet she lives on is old and has lost its atmosphere... until the story happens. When the story happens, all of those details matter, and cooking them in with the rest takes all of the time.

Sure I stew ideas in my brain before I start typing. I mean, of course I do that. But write it all down, draw a map, and make index cards in advance? Nope. I can't.

And I know this utter truth -- that world-building and story-telling are the same thing at the same time -- because I've tried it the other way. You have no idea how many character interviews and world-map sketches I have lying around. But they never cooked themselves into something tastier. They're all just bland. And nobody wants to read dry, bland author notes when there's no story to go along with them. I mean, ugh, right?

So, my answer: I make the story and the world and the characters at the same time, all the time. Writing? For me?* Is all world-building.


----
* You know, just because the writing process works this way for me does not in any way mean it has to work the same way for you. We are all different. Doing all that pre-planning might really stoke your creative engine, and good for you! But I don't want you to feel bad if you don't have a detailed outline and map of your fantasy realm drawn out and labelled before you write Chapter One. You're okay. And you aren't alone.

Worldbuilding - Foundation Process or Procrastination?

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven - one entirely appropriate for science fiction and fantasy authors - is "spending time on worldbuilding vs. actual drafting – what’s your balance?"

I've included a map here that first appeared in THE MARK OF THE TALA, the first book in the original Twelve Kingdoms trilogy. (For those who don't know - I didn't before I drew the map - the split down the middle is to accommodate the book binding.) Quite notably, I didn't draw this map until after the book had been written, the next books sketched out (very sketchily), and a couple of levels of editing completed with my publisher. At that point my editor asked me for a map of the world in the story. He thought it might make it easier for readers to follow the travels of the heroine, Andromeda, the middle princess.

So, I drew a map. Before that, the world had existed only in my head. But I'd envisioned it in vivid detail, so the task of drawing it out ended up being fairly straightforward. I spent most of my time figuring out how fantasy world maps should be drawn, and fixing logistical details like putting the split down the middle.

Later, however, I discover that most people thought I was crazy to do it this way. In fact, many SFF authors spend considerable time, even years, detailing their world maps and building out the details of the society, before they start writing.

Some of this approach, I think, comes from storytellers emerging from role-playing game experiences. In those, a great deal of effort goes into creating the world and rules before the game can be played. This is not me.

I also think that worldbuilding can be a form of pre-plotting. By creating the world and the details, the writer creates a kind of framework or outline for the story to evolve in. This is also not me.

So, it could be that I worldbuild the way I do - which is discovering what it's like by riding around in my characters' heads and observing it - because I write for discovery. That's how my process works on all levels, and faithful readers know I always say the most important thing is to own your process.

There's another reason, however, that I don't do worldbuilding before I write. I decided long ago that the only way I'd get a book written was to put down words. That sounds self-evident, but the decision is a profound one. I made a choice that NOTHING mattered more than putting down words - which includes things like drawing maps and other worldbuilding exercises.

When aspiring writers ask me about worldbuilding, when they tell me what they're doing to create their worlds, I'll say those things are great but they don't count as writing.

Only writing counts as writing.

Strategy Games and Martial Arts in SFF Worldbuilding

When I was in Denver for the RWA National Conference, my friend and writing buddy, Darynda Jones, and I took a lunch break at Ship Tavern in the Brown Palace Hotel. While there, I spotted this guy and snapped a pic. It seemed like a good omen, because I finished THE ORCHID THRONE during our mini-writing retreat there, and now (finally!) am going back to THE ARROWS OF THE HEART. This image is highly relevant to the story, for those of you who've studied the cover. 

Once I finish this blog post, I'm diving back into THE ARROWS OF THE HEART. It gave my own heart a little stab to see I haven't opened the document since March 20, 2018. That's over four months ago. A third of a year! Where has it gone??? I have no idea. 

Anyway, our topic this week at the SFF Seven is: If you had to invent a sport or game for your novels (or ever have), what would it be?

It's probably telling about me personally that I've invented several games, and a couple of martial arts systems, for my books - but never any sports. I'm so not a sports girl. If I were to invent a sport, it would probably be something forced on children where they're forced to deal with objects flying at them at speeds as fast as the scorn of their peers is scathing.

Not that I'm scarred or anything.

Despite my early clumsiness in all things Phys Ed, I later discovered Chinese martial arts - and studied with a school for over fifteen years. I drew on that practice in Tai Chi Ch'uan, Pakua Chang, Hsing-I, Shaolin Temple Boxing, and others, to build the martial system that's part of the worship of Danu in The Twelve Kingdoms, The Uncharted Realms, and even in The Chronicles of Dasnaria. (Fun fact: Jenna's dance, the ducerse, is a modification of a Pakua form that can be performed as a slow dance with saucers of water or lit candles.)

Invented martial systems are a terrific way to flesh out a world in SFF. Many draw on religious or philosophical tenets (as mine do), along with the physical training and more aggressive applications. A character devoted to a martial practice like these will have their entire worldview and choices informed by that. 

I've also invented a few strategy games, such as kiauo in THE PAGES OF THE MIND. That game serves several purposes in the story. The shape of the game board and the pieces give important clues to the culture and what they hold sacred. The game itself allows communication between two people who don't speak the same language - and they build an understanding of each other through it. Also, a strategy game gives character insight in the same way martial systems do. Strategic thinking occurs in more places than on a battlefield. 

Sports can do this, too - JK Rowling's famous sport of Quidditch being a prime example. Come to think of it, it IS a way to torture children and subject them to the scorn of their peers, isn't it? TOLD YOU. 

What World May Be

In no way can I tell you where I got the bug put into my author brain, but here it is. We can dissect it if you wish.

The bug has many legs. It's tiny and hard to see, but it likes to talk. It says that the way to build a believable world/universe/magic system is to limit your change to one major concept. In UF that's easy. Magic happens. The details of how/why/consequences are where the interesting stuff comes in. In SF(R) the major accepted thing is generally space flight. Then it's a matter of what happens when our heroes encounter aliens or aliens encounter them or what happens when the onboard computer says, "I'm sorry, Dave. I afraid I can't do that."

For the most part, the broad strokes don't need a lot of research in my experience. It's the details that do. Take the space flight thing. We're in a space ship! We're getting away from the bad guys! Until they blow out our engine (right before you take the shot that destroys them - thanks for that.) And now we're adrift. We're inside a solar system. So hey! Solar sail! No problem! Uh. Wait. So. Exactly WHAT can I use as a solar sail? Oh hey look. NASA has a position paper out about a theoretical new kind of sail called an e-sail. Hey. That looks cool! So. How fast could we go with that? How far?

Funny. That summary white paper can't answer those questions. And neither can I. So off to ask people with actual training. You do know there are Reddits and forums and message boards where actual rocket scientists hang out? There're even a bunch on Facebook. A few of them will point and laugh when I ask newbie questions, but 99% of the folks really want the rest of us to be science-literate and will offer encyclopedic answers to questions about what kind of acceleration can I expect a ship to put on with a sail blah, blah, red giant, post helium flash, blah. 

Jeffe saw that question go up in one forum and can attest to the awesome answers I got from a handful of really bright people. Made me wish the solar sail figured into more of the story, but alas. We have aliens to vanquish yet. 

Yes. Searching the interwebs for stuff first is the right thing to do - I do find that I can usually garner a broad base understanding of something like nano - technology, but when it comes to how someone would harness nanotech to weaponize it, I didn't have anyone to ask. I had to read and read and then make some guesses. Guesses that I might have gotten dead wrong (though no one has said anything about it yet if I did.) 

And there's the other thing the bug likes to whisper. Don't get so caught up in the research and in being RIGHT that you sacrifice story. Readers will forgive a lot if they're shown a good time inside a story. 

So sure. Research. But make sure you get out there after those villians at great cost to your heroes and heroines. 

Researching the Future - How Do You Do It?

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is "doing the research" - and what that means for building new fantasy or alien cultures.

I'm at a weekend conference sponsored by my local RWA chapter LERA. We brought in Michael Hauge to teach his Story Mastery. Great stuff. Yesterday was his general seminar, and today a dozen of us are doing an intensive advanced story mastery session where we workshop our concepts with him. I'm super excited because I'm working on SOMETHING TOTALLY NEW.

So new that it's science fiction.

Agent Sarah has already seen the concept and given it the thumbs up, so now I'm just working up the details. With my COLLABORATOR.

There are so many new and exciting things here that I can't wait to share.

At any rate, being science fiction, in a universe we're basically creating whole hog, albeit on the foundation of our own, there's a lot of worldbuilding involved. One interesting challenge is that my heroine is a scientist, but obviously operating at a much more sophisticated level technologically.

I know she's made a mistake in her past. I know the results of the mistake and that it has to do with genetic manipulation. I just need to figure out HOW she might have done it. This will require beefing up my current understanding of genetics and how genes are spliced using modern technology, then extrapolating that to a possible future.

I'll likely do this by going to the current scientific literature, but not the hard core stuff. I'll look for cutting edge research as explained in journals intended for broader consumption, like Nature, Science, or Scientific American. I have an advantage that I'm trained as a scientist, so I know how to read and assimilate that kind of information - but I also know that I'm pretty stale, and I never was an expert in genetics. I won't attempt to read the stuff intended for working scientists because I doubt I could keep up. Certainly not without devoting a lot of attention to it and... I probably don't want to do that.

My favorite way to tackle this sort of thing - the ideal shortcut - is to find someone who is a current expert and picking THEIR brain. There's still no search engine that compares to finding a smart person who knows their field really well and getting them to think about the answer.

So, if anyone knows a cutting-edge genetics researcher... :D

Fandom: the Gateway Drug to World Building

The picture has nothing to do with the subject today. It's just the season for butterflies in the zinnias and I was lucky enough to be out there with a camera when this one flitted in to have a snack.

World building, huh? Well. I have a theory.

Fandom is the gateway drug to world building (and often to writing . . .)

Pretend for me that I'm not the only one so invested in a fandom or twelve that I tell myself stories inside the world of whatever story/movie/book/game du jour that I love. I mean, you have a thing you love. Maybe it's Dr. Who, or Anime,  or Star Wars, or Sponge Bob. I don't know and I don't judge. Much. But after you've binge-watched all you can binge-watch, what happens?

If, like me, you go into immediate withdrawal, you probably start daydreaming yourself onto the bridge of the starship Enterprise. Or into some tiny New England sea-side town mysteriously afflicted by madness and rumors of something terrible lurking beneath the surface of the waves. If you do that, you're world building. If you've ever shipped a non-canon partnering in that thing you love, you're world building. Sure. Both are on a small scale and in someone's pre-built world. But you are and you know what they say. The first taste is free.

It's a slippery slope. First you're playing through mental movies of you starring in that thing that gives you life, the next, you're resentful of the restrictions that come with working inside someone else's constraints. I mean it's a stupid rule that Sponge Bob can't fly, right? So you shift worlds - you create a new construct, one that's all your own, one that won't hold back your imagination. The world you create may be based off of something that already exists - whether book, game, TV show or movie, but you'll have tweaked it to suit you. And that's it. You're hooked on world building. You're spending your time debating the finer points of whether magic that requires blood makes the mages of your world vampires and if it doesn't, where exactly IS the line between blood mage and vampire? (Do they ever cooperate? Share blood recipes, maybe?)

World building is a game, one that begins with 'what if?' and ends in narrative structure, conflict and some kind of resolution. You mix and match and create something wholly new. Like a mad scientist. Oh. Oh. Do you suppose this makes one of us here the Walter White of fiction?