World-Building Through Contrast and Unique Concepts

Show Notes

• Wheel of Time 
• Curse of Chalion 
• Game of Thrones
• Legend of the Seeker 
• Derinkuyu 
• The Broken Earth 
• The Difference Engine 
• Stitchpunk 
• Solarpunk 
• Animal Companion 
• Cottagecore 
• Afrofuturism  
• Giant’s Causeway 
• The Cinder Spires
• Raksura 
• Project Habakkuk

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.

[intro music]

Bunny: Hello and welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. With me today is…

Oren: Oren

Bunny: …and…

Chris: Chris.

Bunny: And I’m Bunny, I’m back. And today we’re going to talk about creating a look for your story, by which I mean you should really be using Times New Roman. Stop using Calibri.

Oren: I’m all about Helvetica over here.

Bunny: Helvetica’s okay.

Chris: I have a Comic Sans world.

Bunny: No! You’re the villain, Chris. You’re the villain. Get out of here with your curved Sans Serif letters.

Chris: Yeah, and then some Papyrus.

Bunny: Ugh, not Papyrus.

Oren: Any fans of Montserrat?

Chris: Yeah, I do like that one too. Pronouncing it though is always a bit of a challenge.

Oren: I have no idea how it’s pronounced. I just said it phonetically and rolled the dice because I like to live dangerously.

Bunny: Monster-rat?

Oren: Monts-srat.

Chris: Monster-rat. That’s what it’s gonna be from now on. I have no idea what that looks like, but I can get behind a font called Monster-rat.

Oren: My good friend Oswald.

Bunny: The most classy font: Oswald.

Today we are talking about not just fonts, but how to escape the magical, fantastical, incredibly bland world of Generica, which has cobblestone streets and peasants doing peasant things. And there might be some trees. And a palace probably.

Oren: Yeah, probably some thatched roof cottages.

Bunny: There’s definitely thatching. There’s a lot of burlap around. There’s bales of straw, horses…

Chris: And to be clear, it’s not that these things are necessarily bad. There are definitely cases when you want to evoke the traditional genre look for whatever reason. It’s just that usually you want to do something more than that.

Bunny: Yeah, if you’re relying on your readers to have been familiar with other generic fantasy places and just fill that in themselves, you don’t have a very distinct world going on.

So, the problem is just that a lot of stories over-rely on readers having this notion of what places look like. They rely on that rather than actually building a location or a look for their world. That technically works. The reader is picturing something. They’re picturing Generica, the fantasy town. But they’re also doing the work.

Chris: That imagery will also feel very remote, if they have to, oh look, there’s a castle. It’s still going to be a very blank castle. And as a person whose visual imagination is not very robust, to me that’s a very simple, vague, cloudy castle, if you just say castle.

Oren: So, I would say, having read a fair amount of high fantasy, I do think one thing that leads to this kind of generic feeling is less the choices that you make in terms of, does this setting have things in it other than what might be common in various historical time periods? Or is it that you’re just not interested in making it seem interesting or unique? You have the Wheel of Time, which just feels exceptionally generic.

Bunny: Yes, I remember when my friend was reading that, and the first book travels through three different towns. More than that, it was just a journey between towns that all felt the same but had one thing different.

Oren: Every town is the same, every country is the same, except that occasionally one of the random countries has an accent that doesn’t make any sense. So, it’s extremely generic compared to The Curse of Chalion, or Chalion, whichever it is. Lois McMaster Bujold’s book.

And these books are from about the same time, so I’m not comparing Lord of the Rings to something that comes much later. These are contemporaries.

Curse of Chalion feels much more interesting and much more distinct, even though they are roughly similar in terms of the elements that they have. They have castles made of stone and houses made of wood and thatch. There are probably cobblestone streets in both of them.

The difference is that Curse of Chalion is going for a more grounded approach. That’s why it doesn’t have a lot of much more obvious fantasy elements, and so it focuses on that.

There is a scene that I will always remember in Curse of Chalion: When one of the characters, the princess character I think, puts on a pair of earrings, they’re described as diamond spark earrings. And the description of them really stood out because you realize that until now no one that you’ve encountered has been wealthy enough to wear jewels. That made it seem really neat, that sort of detail.

And I’m not saying that Curse of Chalion is super high on novelty, but it’s higher than Wheel of Time in terms of its location. If this was a TV show, it’s the difference between Game of Thrones and whatever the Sword of Truth series was, which just looked really generic, and that was of course largely down to budgeting. But in written work, you don’t have a budget. You instead have your words.

Chris: Creating a look, Bunny talked about it making your world memorable. It definitely does that. But also, if you want atmosphere, it’s a really important component of atmosphere. And I also think that creating a look gives you something to focus on when you write description. You’ll know what am I trying to do with this description? What kind of things should I feature, for instance?

Bunny: Yeah, it makes description way less perfunctory, especially if you can get excited in the sort of world you’re looking at. It’s way easier for me to write description. I’m like, wow, that’s really cool.

Chris: So, we say the look of your world, but I would also group that together with the aesthetics. So, you can also think about sounds and smells, or the way that things move and change. It doesn’t have to be static. And that kind of fits together in the aesthetics of your world, which is a component of your theme. You can start by thinking about the general theme of your world.

What kind of an atmosphere did you want? Do you want to be more grounded, like Curse of Chalion? Or do you want to be more whimsical? Or in a sci-fi setting, you might decide it’s more space fantasy or more minimalist and futuristic. What kind of story is this? Dark or light?

All of those things, you can start by looking at that and then extrapolate the type of aesthetics that give you that impression.

Bunny: Absolutely. And if you’re not sure where to start, I’ve come up with some questions that you can ask in order to get your creative juices flowing down the mountain to the sea of description.

Chris: Oh, man, that’s some aesthetic imagery right there.

Oren: I wasn’t sure where the metaphor was going, but I like where it ended up.

Bunny: I was saying juices. I was not sure where it was going either.

Some sorts of things that you want to ask yourself is stuff like: What makes life here unique and interesting? What are we doing here? What’s this world like? Why do you want to set it here? And often that’s going to have stuff to do with your plot, which is good. You want it to because then that means you can explore the interesting parts of your world more thoroughly.

There’s also just things you can ask yourself about the culture this takes place in, or the architecture, or how geography shapes architecture. There are some really fascinating cities around the world that have been shaped by the places where they’re built. Obviously, lots of port towns, but there’s an area in Guadix, Spain that supposedly inspired hobbit houses because people live in the hills.

Oren: Oh, man, my absolute favorite is this place. It’s in modern day Turkey, and it’s this area where there’s a large stretch of what’s called tuft, which is a kind of relatively soft stone. And so, there are just miles and miles of underground buildings. Because it was very easy to excavate and the area above isn’t really particularly hospitable. It doesn’t have a lot of cover. There’s not much vegetation. And so, people who lived there over the millennia dug out these tunnels, and it’s super cool.

It’s unfortunately the subject of a lot of conspiracy theories about the whole ancient Atlantis nonsense, but the actual area is super cool. I will put a link to it in the show notes. I can’t remember what it’s called off the top of my head, but I love it. Very fun place to learn about.

Chris: One thing I do think that you should think about upfront, because I’ve had a couple clients that have not, is if you do want your world to seem mysterious in some way, or the supernatural elements to seem mysterious, you have to plan that ahead. Because what happens if you create a general atmosphere or look that has just tons of overt supernatural things happening everywhere, that’s not going to be mysterious. You can’t make it mysterious anymore because it’s all out in the open where you can see it.

So, if you want to be mysterious, you do have to tone down the supernatural front and center. You can still have oh, the mists that descend every evening and nobody can see what happens in them. And right, you have separate aesthetics and separate look that goes with mysteriousness. But you can’t just have every person has a whole horde of magical devices, and now we want the magical devices to be mysterious. Those things are not compatible.

That’s in the same way in Curse of Chalion, Oren remembers these earrings that are luxurious because the setting is grounded. The more higher realism, the grittier your world is, the more that the supernatural things stand out when they appear.

You want to think about that balance, whether you want everything to be magical and whimsical and out in the open right away, or if you would actually prefer something that feels very grounded so that when you do put in something supernatural or something luxurious or something that is hope in a dark setting, for instance, it pops more.

Bunny: Yeah, I think Oren’s example is just a really good instance of using the world to emphasize something by contrast, which is a great way to do that.

Oren: Another tactic that I’m fond of, I’ve done this at least a couple times in some of my own stories and it’s worked okay, is to figure out what cool thing do you want this world to have and then extrapolating from that as a basis.

And as far as published works go, the Broken Earth is a fantastic example because the Broken Earth’s concept is basically what if apocalypse is all the time? It’s an apocalypse punk setting. The world is so geologically unstable that every so often some kind of giant catastrophe happens, and it sets civilization back however many centuries.

So that’s the premise, and Jemisin uses that to influence every aspect of the world and how everything is very locally based. They do have bigger empires, but even those tend to be more insular because when an apocalypse happens, the first thing that breaks down is complicated intercommunication and interdependency, so that’s discouraged. That doesn’t mean everyone’s nice, right? These communities can be mean like anyone else, but it does mean that people are much more focused on who their neighbor is than the stocks they might buy from a city across the continent, stuff like that. And that is just a very cool concept. I like that a lot.

Bunny: That’s a great way to make it memorable. Not a lot of stories have done that either.

Some of the most memorable stories have picked a concept and then just ran with it. Many of the punk genres, right? The blank punk, not just the musicians with spiky hair. Steampunk is maybe the most popular or most well-known of the punks.

Chris: But now the punks have to compete with the cores.

Bunny: Oh, that’s true.

Chris: Steampunk versus cottagecore.

Bunny: Ooh! [laughs]

Oren: That’s an interesting one. Because if you look at some of the early foundations of what’s now the steampunk subgenre, if you look at the Difference Engine, for example, which while no book can really claim to be the first steampunk novel, the Difference Engine is certainly very foundational to the genre.

The premise of that one is what if, the analog computers called the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine that were only theoretical in real life, what if they actually were built and they worked as advertised? That creates a very different kind of setting and the world branches out from there. And it does a reasonably good job.

Now, nowadays, because steampunk has become its own set of tropes and expectations, you can’t just do that again, because then you just get steampunk and everyone’s like, I’ve seen this before. I know what’s going on with steampunk. So, you might need to apply your own twist to make it seem more unique.

Bunny: And there’s other punk genres that haven’t been used as much that I think are pretty ripe for being explored. Chris, I think I remember an article you did that mentioned stitchpunk, which is not something I’ve seen before, but it’s very intriguing where everything’s fabric.

Chris: Yeah, there are a few stitchpunk works, but they’re few and far between. The movie Nine, there’s some video games like Kirby’s Epic Yarn. But yeah, no, it has a lot of potential because you can have constructed creatures and people in it, right? And that really changes the nature of how things work.

Bunny: And that’s really unusual.

Solarpunk is another one. I think that one maybe has the trouble in utopia problem of like, this sounds really great, where’s the conflict?

Oren: Okay, I have to admit, I’ve thought about this. I don’t think that’s true.

Bunny: Oh, really?

Oren: No, I don’t think so. Because solarpunk, granted, it’s new, right? So, it’s very nebulous. But it is largely defined by letting nature reclaim things and powering our civilization on renewables. That’s the defining feature of solarpunk. You have a lot of solarpunk art that’s very beautiful, that shows overgrown buildings and big fields of solar panels and stuff like that.

But that, to me, does not suggest a utopia or a shortage of things that would cause conflicts. Hot take: renewables can break down like anything else. One of the reasons why it’s hard to transition to renewables is that they are often less reliable than fossil fuels. We should do it anyway. Hot take again.

Bunny: It’s gonna get hotter if we don’t.

Oren: It is still very easy to create conflict with people who use, generate their power through solar or wind or what have you. It’s when you get into the Star Trek levels of super advanced mega tech, then you have problems.

Bunny: Okay, I guess I was thinking just too optimistically. Once everyone agrees to use renewable energy…

Chris: …all of our problems are solved. That brings up a good point about wish fulfillment or what the reader is likely to be interested in. And readers have different things that they will get excited over. But having some idea of, okay, what reader base, who likes X, are you catering to with your world?

So, for instance, if you have focus on a lot of adorable animals in your world, right? The animals in your world wear little hats.

Oren: aww!

Chris: Or whatever, everybody has their own companion animal.

Bunny: aww!

Chris: That’s something a lot of readers would get very excited about that you can then cater to. And I think that does help.

And with solarpunk, there’s definitely a wish fulfillment aspect there. People are unhappy with how the environment is being handled right now. So hey, let’s look at a world where that problem was solved. And we have this cool environmental utopia aspect. It doesn’t mean the setting has to be utopian in other ways. But there’s definitely some wish fulfillment there that you can lean into to give readers who are excited about that more novelty and enjoyment than they would otherwise. Similar with stitchpunk, there’s different ways you can go with it.

The funny thing about stitchpunk is you can go light or dark. So, you can have cute little dolls and it’s all happy and light. But there’s also a lot of stories where the people who like dark, creepy content just love creepy dolls. They like subverting that. So, then you could also have the like, oh no, this is the evil doll realm. Dolls exist in the dark and they prey on the children who are foolish enough to play with them or whatever you have. Something like that.

But thinking about what it is that people are interested in the setting and what makes it attractive and how you can bring that out, I do think makes a difference.

Obviously, cottagecore, for instance, comes with this idea of this kind of idyllic life where you’re living in a Thomas Kinkade painting. And that’s something that, again, you can think about with your description. Okay, what does idyllic rural countryside life involve and what are some details that I can put in there?

Bunny: I love me a good story or a good picture or something where it’s just so many books. That’s my wish fulfillment. There’s a lot of cushions, books, and tea. And I’ll take book-tea-cushion-punk any day.

I’m trying to think of other punk aesthetics. The only other one I can think of right now is afropunk, which is also, I think, gaining momentum with maybe the most rises most prominently to my mind being Wakanda, pretty obviously.

Chris: And that’s often tied into solar punk. So, I think Wakanda would be considered solar punk too.

Bunny: Good point. You can also combine these. But if you’re not looking to put your story into a particular existing punk genre, things that you can think about in terms of your cities and your urban areas to make them interesting.

What’s important to your culture? And how does that show up in the motifs that they use and murals and their architectural styles and statues and stuff like that, that can be really cool. Just what does this tell us about what these people value?

Or worlds that have features that lead to different tech. So, if you’ve got floating islands, does the floaty stuff, the float rocks factor into how people use technology? When there are giant trees, you’ll probably have giant tree cities, which are always cool and probably solar punk.

Oren: Or giant tree sloths!

Bunny: …or giant tree sloths. A city on the back of a giant tree sloth.

Chris: On the stomach of a giant tree because they’re upside down.

Bunny: They tried to build a city on the back, and everything fell off.

Oren: I’m glad we’ve all come together on this.

Chris & Bunny: [laugh]

Bunny: And then obviously, the stuff we’ve talked about with inspiration from real places, because there’s some pretty interesting and wild places out there. As with natural formations, the giants causeway, I think it’s called, it’s these hexagonal rocks leading into the sea that were formed by lava flows or something like that. Completely nutty and super cool.

Oren: Basalt does be like that sometimes.

Bunny: Basalt do be formed in hexagons.

Oren: Here’s a question for y’all: Can a story spend too much time establishing its look?

The story that I’m thinking of is The Cinder Spires, another Jim Butcher book. It’s got airships in it, so of course it was all for me. But everyone else I’ve talked to who read it commented on that it was boring, and I agree with them.

And I’m just trying to figure out if the issue there is: Was there too much time spent describing the world and the airships? Or is it just that there wasn’t anything else going on?

Chris: It is worth noting that description does slow the story down. You can mix description in with action, though, and that makes it work a little better and have less likely to slow things down.

But usually, we mainly consider description when it’s there just to set the scene and build that imagery. And while that is happening, usually the story is not moving forward. So, it’s definitely one of those things that can be abused if used too much.

Bunny: If you want to have this really distinct look for your world, it helps to have parts of that look tied into the actual plot. So, when the character goes to interact with the cool world object, they need to go and visit the Blotty Blue and get a What’s-It from it. Then you get to explain what the Blotty Blue is and why the What’s-It is important.

Oren: Very wise.

Chris: It reminds me of the Raksura books where they have airships in that world too. There’s a sequence where the characters walk in and look at the engine of this different type of airship, because there’s several different types of airships that are propelled in different ways in the setting. Everyone was like, oh I love that, but you’ll probably find it boring.

I did.

Bunny & Oren: [laugh] No!

Chris: The airship was aesthetically cool, but I didn’t need to know the details of how it works. I think at that point it’s less about the look and the imagery and more about exposition and you have to care about the mechanics of engines.

Bunny: I think Oren’s gonna need CPR after this.

Oren: Chris, my heart!

Chris: I think the classic mistake that I see all the time with description is that the protagonist walks into the fantasy city, and then right up front, we have the city sketched out like a schematic.

That’s what I call a schematic description, it’s not great. The writer thinks the reader is looking at a piece of paper and they have to tell them, okay, in the left upper most quadrant there was this thing. Now draw this rectangle and it’s three units deep and two units wide, okay? Now in the lower left draw this circle.

Too much information, and the reader is expected to keep track of every detail independently and then, somehow, piece it together into a big picture. That is too much for humans’ working memory. People cannot keep that many things in their head at once. There’s definitely a limit, and for some people of course that limit is going to be bigger than others, but for the most part we have a lot of trouble with that. It’s gonna make it so that we just don’t understand anything at all and start tuning it out after a while.

So instead, it’s about representing details that are evocative and valuable in themselves, not in having a completely accurate picture. It’s less important to say here’s a room, here’s all the different walls of this room, and which piece of furniture is on each wall. That’s less important than, okay, this room is fancy.

So, here’s a plush velvet fainting couch. It’s next to a waist-high vase with all of these glass flowers. That’s an evocative picture and you can put it in the room and then just give it a general idea. A spacious room with a high ceiling and then here’s our fainting couch and there’s maybe a light streaming in through the windows. We don’t know where the windows are.

The reader can just imagine which wall has the window and which wall has the fainting couch. And as long as you don’t contradict them, as long as you don’t specify later, it doesn’t matter how they imagine it. It’s having those general feeling, okay, I know what type of room this is and having those specific evocative items that kind of represent the feeling, those details that can be imagined, that matters.

Bunny: It’s creating, in a lot of cases, instead of just lots and lots of detail, creating impressions that are very solid and clear and memorable.

Oren mentioned the underground city. I seem to remember a book, I didn’t finish it because I don’t think the story hooked me, I think it was called First Light. The premise was that one of the characters lives in this city carved into ice and they ice skate everywhere.

Chris: Oh cool!

Bunny: That’s awesome! I’m gonna remember that forever, what a great idea.

Oren: So, they live in the aircraft carrier made of ice that was bandied around in the Second World War. That’s such a goofy project, that’s what it made me think of.

Bunny: What? The what?

Oren: There was a plan in the Second World War to make an aircraft carrier out of the substance called pykrete, which is basically ice mixed with sawdust. It would have been huge and made of ice.

Bunny: [laughs]

Chris: Fascinating.

Oren: They never did it for a bunch of reasons, but that’s what that made me think of.

Bunny: Wow, someone in our audience needs to make a world where it’s a city made out of pykrete.

Oren: Yeah, what if pykrete was a thing? Guys, get on it. Speculative worldbuilders, make it happen.

Bunny: Please, now that would be memorable. Who the hell worldbuilt Earth? What’s going on with that?

Oren: Yeah, it’s kind of all over the place. Its theming is really weird.

Bunny: One more tactic that you can use is picking one part of your world and then emphasizing it a bunch.

The Search for Wandala does this pretty well, where it’s the idea is that there are aliens, but also all of the microorganisms on our planet have been blown up to macro size. So, the characters ride around on a water bear. There’s also these alien creatures who are there who caused it to happen. It’s just an interesting world in that it feels very fantastical. And as I’m saying this, I’m remembering this book also benefits from some illustrations, so maybe that’s part of it, but it’s also just a cool idea.

Or like Wildwood. I know I mentioned Wildwood on a previous podcast, but their thing is like Pacific Northwest, forest, and evil ivy. There’s ivy everywhere. Again, memorable.

Oren: Water bears are a meme. So, putting giant water bears in your story, there were certainly worse options available, I would say.

Bunny: More giant water bears. That’s what you should take from this episode. And Pykrete.

Oren: Everyone loves Pykrete. It’s everyone’s favorite thing once they hear about it.

Bunny: A Pykrete battleship pulled by giant water bears.

Oren: Yeah, there we go. Now we’re putting the important things together. With that image, I think we’re going to go ahead and end this podcast.

Chris: If you enjoyed hearing about Pykrete and other world building tips, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie McLeod. Next, we have Amon Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson is a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.

[Outro Music]

This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Colton.