robert jordan

Creating Worlds of Wonder (3 of 3)

/ Hui Lang / 1 Comment

In the previous two posts (One and Two) regarding world-building, we discussed the rules on maintaining consistency and the tools you’ll use to craft your world in order to keep it all straight. But what if you’re in the middle of your series, and then suddenly you’re hit with an awesome inspiration, but it requires a fundamental change?

Here, we discuss what to do when you need to make a change that essentially violates the rule of consistency in your world-building.

Evaluate the damage if you just make a change and not expect the reader to notice. For example, if you have some far-off country named Ko-Astera, you’ve never used it in your series other than make a couple of references to it, will your readers notice if you introduce a character who is from Astera, not Ko-Astera? It depends, if you’ve been providing the reader a glossary and it specifically names the nation and inhabitants as Ko-Astera, you’ll need to come up with a justification. You can write the minor change as part of a dialogue:

“Hey, I thought you were called Ko-Asterans?”

“You thought wrong, fool. We changed and dropped the name of Ko the Usurper back to its proper name. We are Asterans. Get it right before I take my blade and butcher you like I’ve done my cows at home.”

“Excuse me, wolf-biter. It was just a dancing question. No need to get bloody Six Flames bent over it.”

Then, in this book, you’ll have a revision and a note about Ko-Astera now changed to Astera.

You’re literally changing the look/feel of a particular species. This one is a bit harder to do. Say for example you have a race of demon-touched humans who you never really took the time to describe other than they are humans with demonic tendencies, but you saw a super-awesome picture of a succubus with demon horns, furry goat legs, the whole nine yards. You want your demon-touched people to have this look and feel. Congratulations, make it part of the plot. Bad Stuff is happening and guess what—it’s changing the demon-touched more like into actual demons. When the book is concluded, the process is not reversible.

You need to add a new magical ability/spell/power. Just add it, and make it seem like it was part of the plot/story arc all along.

You need to “break” a rule in your world because you realize it will be totally awesome. You’ll need to work this into your story as part of the dialogue or an event. For example, you have a water mage and you want them to cast fire spells. You need to work out a method or something in the plot so it makes sense you have broken this rule. In Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, it was long established men could not channel (use magic) without going insane, so the theme of one of the books was to overcome just this problem.

In conclusion, when you discover you can writing something really cool and awesome, but it will violate the rules regarding consistency, a bit of creativity and stepping back to alter the direction of the story can be yours.

Happy writing!

Creating Worlds of Wonder (2 of 3)

/ Hui Lang / 2 Comments

In the last post of this series, I discussed the rules of about world-building. In this post, I will discuss how those rules are applied into actual tools and what said tools consist of.

First, why have these tools to begin with? For one thing, it will help you maintain a level of consistently. Not every author can keep track of every alien/foreign element in their world. The stranger you have something referred to using oddly spelled-out words, the harder it gets to keep all of it straight. For example, in my portal fiction, Fallen From the Stars, the elves referred to marriage as the “reading of their oaths.” They don’t have the words “married” or “marriage” (though the humans from the valley do). I have to have this written down somewhere because I have other cultural references, greetings, salutations, etc I need to keep track of. So there are two tools that you’ll commonly come across to help you keep all of this in good working order—the story bible and the glossary.

  1. Overview of the world
  2. Primary Religions / Gods
  3. Special Geographic Locations (floating islands, etc)
  4. General System of Magic
  5. The Races and Cultures (orcs, gnolls, humans, elves, etc.)
  6. Individual Nations
    1. Nation One
      1. Culture
      2. Politics / Government
      3. Special Laws / Taboos / Customs
      4. Special Notes
    2. Nation Two, etc…
  7. Special Terms / Terminology
  8. Technological Levels
    1. Medicine
    2. Warfare
    3. Transportation
    4. Communication
  9. Special Artifacts (magic swords, rings, crowns, etc.)
  10. Historical Timeline (go as far back as need to)

The story bible is more than just an outline (though it can contain it). It is the author’s comprehensive system of how their entire world works. It’s a behind-the-scenes toolkit that details the magic system, the religions, cultural nuances, nations, geography, races, all the way down to curse words to the name of the world/universe itself. It is as detailed as you need it to be (key word: need). When crafting your fantasy world or world that uses some form of mystical elements, take the time to put some effort in it. Start with a big overview, then work your way down like this:

As you can see, we can get quite detailed on just the list alone. An article I read some years ago (don’t quote me though) about Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series is that his story bible was as thick as one of his books. If you’re not familiar with his work, his series was fourteen big books weighing close to an average 1,000 pages.

Now the important caveat is you should only create what you need to completely tell your story in its entirety. If you wrote out your outline for all six of your books and you never have your characters go to the nation of Ko-Astera, never interact with the djinn-like humans who live there, never use a Fire Summoner in your stories, don’t spend a lot of time detailing that nation and everything within it. The same with Conjuration magic. If you don’t have anyone who is a Pact-Binder with a demon from the Eternal Abyss, you don’t need to detail this system of magic.

Will you be laying this out to your reader in your books? I hope not unless it’s critical to your story. But if your characters are following the rules you outline in your story bible, your reader will note the consistency and detailed world-building. They will appreciate that—greatly (assuming your readers like world-building).

There are many articles on world-building and building your story bible. I (personally) hate most of them, because they are very generic. If you want an actual live example, there are books that give just that to you. They are called campaign guides or campaign settings. If you ever played Dungeons and Dragons or similar table-top rpgs, you’ll be familiar with what a campaign setting is. Video game guides to popular fantasy worlds are also great resources and examples. Essentially, they are the “story bible” for the game master to run such games that keep everything in a logical manner. Some of them are quite detailed and beautifully written. Here is one of my favorites, though it’s nowhere close to comprehensive:

Pathfinder Campaign Setting

The second type of resource is a glossary. This is for your reader. It goes at the beginning or at the end of each book of your series and pretty much is what you’ll use as your own story-bible. Whatever is in the glossary is all you’re using to tell your story. It’s a “story bible lite” per se. This is great if you don’t have a lot of different detail in your world, such as an urban fantasy set in modern day Seattle, but you just need to advise the reader of the different names of werewolf clans, their powers, their blood magic, and their weaknesses.

In my next post, I’ll discuss what do when you run into problems. Until then, happy writing!

Creating Worlds of Wonder (1 of 3)

/ Hui Lang / 3 Comments

Here, we discuss world-building. If you’re a writer in fantasy, horror, and science-fiction, you have to do a little world-building which is establishing the setting, rules, and workings of the environment your characters live and interact with.

For example, your story takes place in a kingdom ruled by a young queen who has reached her fifth birthday. A convent of regents “advise” her on important decisions, but she gets to have the peasants beheaded almost every day while eating a big slice of cake. Now, I made that up on the fly, but as the characters interact living in this kingdom, how do they go about their lives while living in such a place?

So, for Part 1 of 3 regarding world-building, we will focus on the “rules” (guidelines mostly):

  1. Be consistent. This is a definitely a rule, unless your story is a tongue-in-cheek comedy about inconsistency. Every other type of story, you need to be consistent. If you establish that fire mages cannot wield water spells, don’t have a scene where a fire mage is casting a water spell unless you have a very good reason for breaking the rule. If you’re not consistent in your world-building, you’ll confuse your readers, who have to stop and ponder what it was they read, figure out how to make their own connection, and if they are dissatisfied, they will leave you a bad review or quit your book.
  2. Create what you need. This is a guideline, but a good one. I read an article a long time ago that Robert Jordan, author of the Wheel of Time series, created a story-bible (all the detailed notes on how his world worked) that is as thick as one of his books (it was over 1,000 pages). Now, it was evident he needed all of it to write and plan out his series (which ended up being fourteen large books), but if you plan out your book and it only takes place in a small barony, you don’t need to create detailed notes of the government of a kingdom on the other side of the continent. In my book, Fallen From the Stars, the entire setting is in the elven village. I had notes on all ninety-eight elves who lived in the village, a map of the village, but beyond that, I have a few general notes of the barony and the kingdom, and some general notes on magic and religion.
  3. Reveal through dialogue. People like Robert Jordan, GRR Martin, and Tolkien crafted incredibly rich-worlds and they painstakingly took their time to explain the workings of the world to the reader; however, just as many people who loved it, there are just as many critics who hated it calling it info-dumping. Info-dumping is you, as the narrator, explaining parts of your world to the reader prior to getting to any dialogue, in between scenes, or after a scene has concluded. A more viable way to explain your world is through dialogue. JK Rowling did this 99% of the time in Harry Potter. Harry, being ignorant of the wizarding world, would ask a very innocent question, and someone would take the time to explain to him on how it works. What made it fun would be Harry’s reaction afterward. In Fallen From the Stars (my novel), the main character is a human from our world, so the elves explained to him how things work around the village.

    Use this method with a bit of caution. There is a reason why Robert Jordan chose to info-dump as opposed to revealing through dialogue in that all his characters were very knowledgeable of the world around them. In would have been unrealistic for Matrim Cauthon to be approached by Moiraine Damodred and he asks her, “What’s an aes sedai?” and she replies, “We cast spells, manipulate politics, the Reds have men issues, and crap.” Matrim knew what an aes sedai was and he lived in a very backwater rustic village in the middle of nowhere, so Jordan established that even the rustics possessed knowledge of the world around them.

In the next part of this series, I will discuss the tools you can have at your disposal to build and maintain your world while crafting your series, and then in the follow-up, how to fix problems that are created when you need (or want) to create inconsistencies.

Happy writing!