A common complaint about spec fic stories is that the world feels like it has no history, like entire planets simply appeared fully formed from the author’s mind. And yet, most readers get annoyed if presented with a block of historical exposition, which puts authors in a bit of a bind. How do we create histories for our stories without boring everyone? This week, we’ve got a few ideas of how to do just that, plus a lesson on why it’s important for your history to sound like juicy gossip.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Phoebe. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant podcast. With your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
[intro music]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is–
Bunny: Bunny.
Oren: And–
Chris: Chris.
Oren: Now settle down. I have 500 pages of Mythcreant podcast history to get through. We’re gonna cover every significant event and also every insignificant event.
Bunny: Oh no, I thought I finished this class in high school.
Oren: So obviously we’re gonna cover the times when we changed hosts and the creation of Sandwich Discourse.
Bunny: Oh, he’s holding a textbook, Chris, we might wanna run.
Chris: Yeah. Before I introduce any idea, it’s important that I stop and to just tell you my entire evolution of how I came up with that idea, what I was doing at the time when the thought occurred to me, and all the posts that I had on that topic, so you know exactly how it happened.
Oren: Yeah. We need to cover things like how often we adjust our recording levels. That’s part of the history of this podcast.
Bunny: Can’t understand us without it.
Oren: You might notice that despite being more than a decade old, the podcast hasn’t really changed at all. Actually, that’s not true. It’s changed a lot. It used to be so much worse.
Bunny: There used to be somebody named Mike–
Chris: Yeah!
Bunny –I’m told, I don’t know who this Mike is.
Oren: This was the ancient days. The ancient days when Mike was around. And then the slightly less ancient days when Wes was around. Things change over time. Come back in 10 years and we’ll be telling some new person about Bunny, like “Bunny once was here!” and they’ll be like, “Uhhuh. Yeah, sure, Oren, you podcasted with a bunny. That’s real.”
Bunny: Very sentient bunny. Don’t worry.
Chris: Before the Bunny reckoning.
Bunny: Yes. Before I deposed Wes.
Chris: And then after the bunny wars we banned Bunnies.
Bunny: No bunnies anymore. And since I’m a part of this podcast, that means I need to explain where I was 10 years ago. Get ready to hear about me as a tween.
Oren: It may or may not be relevant to the podcast, but we did research for it, so now it’s everyone’s problem. So we’re talking about giving your world history ’cause that’s the thing that in theory, everyone wants, but no one likes reading. So, that’s worth talking about, I think. First I have a process question for my other hosts, which is when you guys are writing, whether it is prose or you’re creating a campaign world or any kind of creative activity, how do you go about building history?
Bunny: So for me, because my stories tend to be standalone and not multiple stories set in the same world, I’m usually most concerned with what the present day looks like and how it got there as the most relevant parts of the history. For my most recent project, I’m only really focused on one specific part of the world. So the history there is what’s most important, and the story is set in a former mining town that had a boom when the fantasy natural resource called Radiance was discovered there, and it became a huge mining town, and then the resource ran out and everybody left, and now it’s a ghost town.
So that is the history that’s relevant to the story. So I think when I look about putting together history for my worlds, it’s very “how did we get to where we are now for this specific circumstance?” I don’t know much about the greater politics of the country that the story is set in or whatever. It’s very focused in on this little town where the story takes place.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: For me, the first question I would have to ask is how much world building am I trying to do in this particular story and how much room I have? I’ve been doing a bunch of shorter stories. I completed a novella recently. There’s just not room for a super detailed, nuanced world. And my answer to that, I just didn’t. I didn’t add history.
It’s like, “hey, this is how it is now.” ‘Cause it is. It’s a little realism, fairytale world, which doesn’t demand a lot. If I was doing something super high realism, maybe I would have to think a little deeper, but that’s the point where you need things to be simple and you don’t have room. If I tried to do a short story and make a super unique world that would not usually go over very well.
I would be squeezing and squeezing to try to make everything fit. Now that I’m actually plotting a novel, yeah, I can feel like I have room to add more nuance and interesting things to my world.
Oren: There’s so much space.
Chris: Yeah. I’m just like, okay, so. What things do I have in this setting that are unusual that the plot makes use of in researching those specifically? So, for instance, I have a big spire that’s like a natural feature, and I decided that that spire was caused by some kind of volcanic eruption of some kind that was somewhat magical in nature. And then I did research on geology features around different types of volcanic activity, and then used that to hape the geography of the area. So that would be really far back history.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: My story also features a religious order and did some history there, and so just took the things that were unusual and let most other things go without tons of research. But then I used the research, of course, to make things feel—to gimme more ideas for more ways I can make the world creative, but that fit the things that I already have. So adding more novelty there and adding context that makes things feel a little bit more realistic and more detailed and that kind of thing with, again, the goal not being to sit down and give people a history lesson, but if you have more knowledge about the world, hopefully that translates to more nuance when you write about it and readers can tell.
Oren: Right. A lot of your world’s history is gonna be implied. ‘Cause if you’re trying to directly communicate it, you are probably gonna have a bad time. Usually the history that you’re directly communicating is gonna be whatever is really relevant to the plot.
Bunny: See appendix one for more information.
Oren: Right. I mean that’s basically backstory, that kind of history where you straight up lay out the events that happened. That’s backstory for your setting, and you should treat it the same way you treat backstory for your characters, which is that sometimes you need it, but only as much as you need.
When I’m creating a world that is big enough that I’m gonna be spending more than a short story worth of time there, I try to have signifiers of things that give the impression of the passing of time. I don’t want to have a world where it feels like everything there was built today. Everything here is from, we built it two weeks ago. It’s all modern. Everything’s from the same time period. Unless I’m doing an unusual world, a popup city on an alien planet or something.
Bunny: There’s still someone named Mike here? What’s going on? This hasn’t changed at all.
Oren: I try to think about, okay, what are different, easily distinguishable time periods that stuff can be from? And that’s not gonna work all the time. Again, sometimes you will have places where things were all built recently, but that’s its own thing. I have the ancient walls of the city. Those are the oldest part, and you can distinguish those in how they’re described. And then you can have the really nice buildings.
Those are newer but still pretty old. And then you can have the ramshackle buildings that burn down every time there’s a fire and those are gonna be brand new. So that sort of thing.
Chris: My setting has periodic, let’s just call them mini cataclysms—
Oren: Yeah!
Chris: —that tend to destroy buildings, instructors. So I thought it’d be fun.
Like, okay, there were city walls. They’re now past the period in which they would be using walls. They didn’t take any time to take the walls down. But the walls would basically be destroyed a lot faster because of the environment. So now I can put in old remnants of the pieces of the walls that are still there, they haven’t bothered to take down, but it’s not like a full wall anymore because that stuff goes away pretty fast.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Bunny: Yeah, people love ruins. One thing that I’ve had fun with in this mining town setting is that the mining town itself is a ghost town, right? It’s been abandoned for a hundred years, 50 years maybe since it was at its peak. And so the protagonist that’s coming from a world that’s gotten a lot more technologically advanced, so that’s given me the opportunity to have the protagonist go around and comment on, “oh wow, that’s pretty ancient by my standards piece of technology, everything’s all rusty and falling apart,” and when there’s a shiny new piece of technology in this rusted, dusty old town, it stands out like ruins do, right, exactly. Finding a way to have the history really clash with the modern stuff, I think helps make the world feel like it’s had a progression.
Oren: Yeah, I agree. And you also wanna think about what is in here that needs to be explained, that is gonna stick out as weird to readers, and they’re gonna be like, what is that? A lot of the stuff we’re talking about here are subtle details that help make the world feel more real, but don’t necessarily need a big explanation, like Chris’s city walls that the town has outgrown and are now in ruins. That’s a cool detail. You probably don’t need to go too much into it. You could throw in some lines about it, but it wouldn’t be confusing anyone if you didn’t.
Chris: The only time I’ll probably mention it is I think I have one scene planned where there’s some gawkers that are looking at something and a convenient place for them to gawk would be to climb up on this old city wall. So it’s just a description. It’s not gonna really affect the plot that much.
Oren: But like if your medieval town has a giant glowing orb in it, even if the orb has been there for a long time, and to the locals, it’s just the orb that everyone already knows about.
Bunny: You know, the orb.
Oren: Yeah, the orb.
Bunny: Orby.
Oren: To readers, that’s gonna be weird and it’s gonna be very confusing if you mention that and then just keep going as if that’s a normal thing.
Bunny: Wait, you mean you don’t have an orb?
Chris: Yeah.
Bunny: What’s wrong with you?
Chris: Although, I would say that I think that the most important thing there is that you have a world where the orb fits in. If this is a fantastical element, you could give the orb history, but history by itself is not necessarily gonna make the orb feel less bizarre.
Oren: True.
Chris: So if our goal is to take something fantastical and make it feel like it’s a natural part of the world, we need to see other parts of the world that are orb-like, whether it’s, this world has lots of glowy things, or this world has lots of altars to a particular God that glow and for this city, it happens to be an orb, or in some way that gives it some thematic unity with the rest of the world.
Bunny: I’m gonna write a story set in Seattle, but instead of the Space Needle, it’s an orb.
Oren: Yeah, the Space Orb.
Bunny: And that’s the only difference. It’s a space orb. It’s just an orb.
Chris: Somebody has a story about somebody traveling to the most uninteresting, alternate worlds ever. Went to an alternate reality, and it’s exactly the same as this one, except for the Space Needle is an orb.
Bunny: You go to alternate reality, you go to Chicago and instead of the Bean facing downward, the Bean is curving upward now.
Oren: We flipped the Bean. It was a pretty pivotal moment in history.
Chris: I did some dangerous alternate world traveling for this.
Bunny: Worth it? Surely.
Oren: I do have an important tip for the writers at home, which is that if you love history and you love creating history, and you wanna tell your readers more about the history you created, there’s one weird trick. Nobody hates it. Everyone loves it, which is to make the history important to your plot. I’m not gonna say that gives you free reign to give all of the history, but it will greatly increase the amount of history you can give.
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: The most obvious example I can think of is The Broken Earth by NK Jemisin, which has a really weird world that has a lot of strange history about constant apocalypses and how the mages were enslaved and all that stuff, and that’s very important to the story and to the plot that’s happening now. So there is more of an opportunity to explain it.
Now, Jemisin still has to work it in over time. She can’t just open up with, “here, read this textbook and then I’ll tell you about the world.” But that allows her to do a lot more with it. In my book, I of course, ’cause I’m a huge nerd, I have a lot more history for that world than is in the story because most of it’s not relevant.
I included the bits that were relevant and a few bits that I probably shouldn’t have, but I thought I could get away with it when Chris wasn’t looking.
Chris: Not the silks. Silks had to go.
Oren: Yeah, you wouldn’t let me keep the Byzantine silk parallel that I was really excited about.
Bunny: You had a Silk Road, is that what I’m hearing?
Oren: I did sort of.
Chris: They were traveling at the time, so.
Oren: It was a reference to the Byzantine silk industry that was supposedly, this part’s probably apocryphal, but was supposedly created by smuggling silkworms out of China in a hollow walking cane.
Bunny: Whoa.
Oren: It’s a fantastic story, and I love that story, and I wanted to reference it, and Chris was like, no one knows what the heck you’re talking about, Oren. Stop that.
Bunny: Well, now you can put an asterisk in the book that says, “refer to podcast 521 at minute 15” or whatever.
Oren: Yeah, find out all about the silkworms. I’ve got history that I thought of about, the main character has a darker skin tone than some of the other characters that she encounters, and I’ve got a whole history to explain that. But I didn’t need to put that in the story. It wasn’t important.
Chris: Speaking of NK Jemisin, I think another good one is 100,000 Kingdoms, because some people like to have world mythology of how the world was made, and that’s one where it’s actually relevant because the story is about a struggle between three ancient gods who created the world. And so that world origin story is their backstory of their relationship, and it matters. Whereas if you pulled out an origin story for the world and it just wasn’t relevant, people, their eyes would glaze over pretty quickly at that point.
Oren: Yeah, and much like too much exposition in general, it’s not super common to find published novels, at least not published novels that have any wide readership, that have too much history, just because to get published, you generally have to understand that you want to cut that down to the minimum you can get away with. But there are a few, Lord of the Rings has both, right? It has the stuff about the mines of Moria, which is really interesting and contributes to the story.
And then it also has a bunch of stuff about various princes of Gondor and we don’t need to know any of that. Like that doesn’t help.
Chris: Yeah. When it comes to really old history, like you’re doing mythology for your world, if you don’t have Gods, you can use it to explain something. Let’s say your origin story explains how magic works to the audience. That might be helpful.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: I do think, again, people have to remember that it’s not just the fact that it fits your story. Also, how much you tell readers at once really matters. You can only get them to learn a few things at a time. So if you have this origin story that’s full of very useful information, you still probably can’t give it to them at once just because they can’t remember all of that.
Oren: Yeah, and I suspect tolerances for that are lower than they used to be. The Belgariad books, which have a lot of problems, but they open with, at least what I remember, and granted it’s been a while, maybe it’s shorter than I remember it, but I remember them opening with a very long creation story of how the gods made the world and how one of the gods was a dick, and then they had to fight him and then they did a lot of fighting and made an ocean. They’re like, this is this. It seems like a lot.
Chris: So, uh, hot tip. Don’t make your world creation story racist.
Oren: Yeah, that’s also a good idea.
Chris: I cannot not think about that. If you talk about the Belgariad and that origin story, it’s just oof, it’s messed up.
Oren: Well, the Belgariad is like the ultimate example of why a wizard did it is a bad explanation. ‘Cause that’s a thing that some people in fantasy or even sci-fi think is acceptable to be like, “yeah, well I have a world where people of different skin tones really are stupid, and it’s because Gods made them that way. I’m not racist. The gods are.” And it’s like, that’s not, mm-mmm. Mm.
Bunny: And who made the gods? Huh? Huh?
Oren: Or like [Dragonriders] of Pern, where we eventually get the backstory on why girl dragons can’t breathe fire. It’s not ’cause the author’s sexist, it’s ’cause the person who made the dragons was sexist. It’s just like, why? Just don’t do it.
Bunny: Yeah, you could just not.
Chris: Another thing that you can use a little history for even a little history in exposition is just building mystique around things. And I think that’s also really important to Lord the Rings.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Is that we build atmosphere where we build up Sauron. Sauron would not be impressive if he did not have a long history.
Oren: That’s true.
Chris: And even if we don’t necessarily need to know that history, having some of that history really builds him up as a villain. And so you could do other things if you’re introducing a new noble house, be like, oh, this was the noble house that was marked a traitor after the reckoning. You would have to keep it really brief and really focus on what is the impression that you want to create for this story element, and make sure that emphasizes that and that it’s a simple, iconic, easy to remember. But that’s another thing that history is great for, especially in fantasy.
Oren: [My] experience of both written stories and role playing games is that audiences have much higher tolerance for spicy history as it were history that has some kind of ooh factor of, okay, so this is the family that was cast out for having cowardice at the important battle. It’s like, oh, really? Tell me. That sounds juicy.
Bunny: Oh, the Real Housewives theory of exposition.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah, just make all of your history sound like gossip, and you’re good to go.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, honestly. You know, people, they’re not gonna care that much about a trade deal, even if the trade deal is gonna be important later. But they might care about the merchant who made everyone’s clothes suck for a year ’cause they bought up all the good cloth, right. That’s a little more interesting, you know. To a certain extent there, you can even test it by just imagining, would my friends be interested in this story? Sometimes that can be a surprisingly good bar for whether or not this is worth including.
Bunny: Would someone go “ooooooooh” at it?
Oren: Yeah, exactly. That’s the perfect sound effect.
Chris: Another thing I think that history can be good for is helping to flesh out your culture and another place that history can show up. So simple things like readings, prayers and ceremonies, any symbols or ideologies people have can be shaped by past history, and so you can have a scene that is supposed to be a wedding scene or any other thing that’s supposed to be fancy, and you need people to say something that sounds grand, then you can reference any beliefs that they have or remaining, “Let’s never let the reckoning happen again,” you know.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: “For unity, so we never sunder again” or something like that, you can build it in. I do like having culture that has some level of memory. It’s not as simple as, “oh, there was a war, so we banned X,” which we’ve seen just way too many times. Oh, the eugenics war. Now no gene manipulation whatsoever. There may be reasons to ban eugenics, but people use, “oh, but there was a war, and so then we did this ridiculous thing.” It’s like, look, we’ve had lots of wars in the world and we have not banned love yet. So.
Oren: Yeah, I mean, we haven’t banned the things that actually caused the wars, let alone a random unaffiliated thing like love or friendship or like in Plus One, where it’s like, hey, the world is divided into people who work at the daytime and people who work at night. Why that? Because of the Spanish flu. That’s why.
Bunny: Really?
Oren: Yeah, that’s the explanation. ‘Cause the Spanish flu caused a shortage in workers and so they were more divided. It’s like, what is this? No explanation would be better than this.
Chris: There is cultural change that can be brought about by historical events where people shortly after a disaster are usually more motivated to ensure that it doesn’t happen again and take certain precautionary measures, and that can include having some kind of ideology that started, or new rules or something like that. But it’s just, be practical with it. We fought over oil and unfortunately have not banned oil yet, so.
Oren: Yeah. We wish.
Bunny: Turns out the things we go to war over are things we care a lot about most of the time and are probably going to war to keep ’em around rather than get rid of ’em.
Oren: Yeah. I would also encourage wherever possible to think of history in terms of things that make the story more immersive instead of adding friction. I see this is a thing people online sometimes like, ’cause they’ll be like, well, “the save icon is a floppy disc and a lot of people using computers don’t know what a floppy disc is. So in your setting, you should describe how something is weird and out of place like that.” But should you? I would argue no, usually, because that just makes the reader think that you’re going to go into that and then you don’t.
Chris: I do think that we have to consider cognitive load. Part of this is how much detail do you have room for for your world in your story? If the complexity of all of the other story elements are low and you have a fairly high word count, maybe you have room for lots of details and you can explain some of those details.
But at the same time, there can be a cost when we add more detail and especially if we’re making up new terms. And there is something to be said for just immersing somebody in a world and having context clues and some terms used in ways where you tell what they mean without stopping and explaining everything.
But that also can be a liability if we just add tons of unfamiliar words in there, especially for your first few pages when people are getting to know your story. It all just adds up to the point where it becomes really confusing and disjointed for somebody to try to read. So again, some terms are good and it’s not like you can’t do that at all.
It doesn’t mean you always have to explain terms and things you’ve added because you understand history, so you know that people do X, Y, Z, but that can become confusing and it all adds up. So just a limit on how many weird things that the reader’s just gonna run into while they’re just trying to read a paragraph and trying to understand what’s happening.
Bunny: For the most part, you should definitely name your historical events intuitive things. You’ll notice we usually do that in the real world too, right? It’s World Wars One and Two. They didn’t even have Electric Boogaloo in the second one, and you hear about something called the God War, you’re probably like, oh, it’s a war involving Gods. Pretty straightforward. If it was called Boopdi Wawa War, even if that’s something in your setting—
Chris: When the Boopdis and the Wawas went to war!
Bunny: Yeah, the Boopdis versus the Wawas.
Chris: Very brutal.
Bunny: Everything changed when the Boopdis attacked.
Oren: I can absolutely think of a bunch of historical things with names that do not make sense, and I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to say which is more common. But I would generally agree unless you are trying to make some kind of statement that is important to your story, you probably don’t want to name something that is neither Holy Roman nor an empire, the Holy Roman Empire. Yeah, it’s real, it’s from real life, but it’s probably not worth the time it would take or the confusion it would cause in most cases.
Chris: Descriptive names in general are gonna cause less confusion. So it doesn’t mean that you always have to use descriptive names or a reason not to, especially if you have a con lang and you want all of your world terms to feel like they come from the same language. It’s just, it all adds up.
So you have to conserve that where it’s not important. If this is not important to you, make it simple. And that way you can spend your complexity points on some other part of the story, some other part of the backstory, some other terms.
Oren: Yeah. One more thing I wanna cover before we end the podcast is the issue of whether your world was actually different if you go back in time, back in your history. And that’s a thing that for a lot of us is never going to matter because we are never going to tell a prequel story. We’re never gonna go back in time from the present. So you don’t have to worry about it too much. But if you are planning something like that, be it because you wanna tell a bunch of stories in the same world, or you just are big into prequels for whatever reason, that’s something I would consider because it gets real weird if your story is set 500 years earlier and everything is exactly the same.
Chris: Or 10,000 years earlier. Looking at you, Dune: Prophecy.
Oren: Oh man, I tried to think of a joke, ‘Cause in Dune, 10,000 years before the book starts, you still have the Atreides and the Harkonnens, the same houses. And I was like, okay, what joke can I make using a famous historical figure to show how long a time period that is? And I can’t because 10,000 years ago is 8,000 BC and we don’t know the names of anyone from that time period.
Chris: That’s too long before our recorded history.
Oren: The best I could come up with is, okay, so imagine if the Caesar and Magnus families, which are Julius Caesar and Pompe Maximus, or Pompey Maximus, respectfully, were still fighting for control of Italy, but times eight. That is how long these families have not only been around, maintained the same name and the same enmity. My gosh.
Bunny: It’s like if the earliest known customer service complaint.
Oren: Yeah.
Bunny: If the copper guy and the other guy were still beefing
Oren: If Ea-nāṣir’s copper industry was still around, times three or something. Alright, well with that I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you would like this podcast to continue our long and storied history, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons who have been with us for quite a while. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[outro music]Outro: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening/closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Colton.
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