The Mythcreant Podcast 555 – Explaining Complex Worlds
Speculative worlds have a lot going on, which is why we love them. Cool magic and meticulous technology, it’s what we live for. But oh, wow, is it hard to explain, especially at the beginning. That’s when you need to hook readers with something exciting, but if you don’t establish at least some of the world, confusion will reign. Thankfully, we’ve got some tips which are not at all based on our own difficulties!
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[opening song]Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: And a quick logistical note: sadly, Bunny will be out for a while. She had a very exciting opportunity. That means she just doesn’t have as much time for podcasting. So we hope to have her back in the future, but we just didn’t want it to seem like she disappeared suddenly. She’s still around Mythcreants. Hopefully we will still see her at some point.
So that’s that note out of the way. Now, Chris, I have a problem.
Chris: Hmm?
Oren: My world is inside a snail that’s running laps around an infinitely dense salami stick, which was made from the Great Galactic Boar. And I need to explain all of this right away, because my protagonist is a salamibender whose power is dependent on where the snail is in its laps and is activated by recounting the boar’s great deeds. How do I explain this all in my opening fight scene?
Chris: Ugh. I’m in this opening bit and I don’t like it.
Oren: It is your fault, Chris. Your story did somewhat inspire this topic.
Chris: And yours!
Oren: Yeah, mine too, but I’m cheating. It’s easy. I took the easy way out.
Chris: So, people may be interested to know that Oren and I have been each working on a new novel, and very much in parallel; we’re about at the same stage, which has been very interesting, and sometimes doing similar things. And that has given us the opportunity to see how we’ve both planned out our openings, dealing with worlds that are pretty complex.
Oren: Yeah, see: your world is complex because it has an intricate magic system that is inextricably tied to the plot and upon which everything depends, and it has consistent rules that people can learn. My world is complex ’cause it’s full of silly bullshit. We are not the same.
Chris: I mean, it is interesting. Your world is very novel, I would say, and has lots of really interesting things going on. Is it intimately connected to the plot? I mean, I know that it is, right? Like any good fantasy storyteller, you make sure that it matters that we’re in that particular world, but at the same time, it’s not quite so tightly connected, which I think makes it easier for you to more slowly introduce the world.
I think my world is actually less complex than yours, but everything is so consolidated and dependent on everything else that I kind of have to introduce everything all at the beginning, or else there can be no plot movement until you understand the mages working for mage organizations fighting a magical disaster.
Oren: I think you should just let people be confused. I’ve decided to become one of those people who’s just like, “Don’t worry about it.”
Chris: Oh, don’t want to hold their hand.
Oren: Yeah, don’t hold their hand. Just, like, dump everything on them. I already understand it. So they should be able to, right? It’s not like I have an advantage ’cause I’ve been talking to you about this story for the last year, right? It’s probably fine.
Chris: Yeah. No, it’s going to be a whole other ball game when we get beta readers who have not heard anything about our stories. Already, I’ve had a funny experience where I am playing around with more historical language and one convention, because I’ve been listening to Anne Radcliffe, who’s a really classic gothic novel writer, and she frequently describes things by saying, “Oh, you know, the eye would follow this or that,” right? And it means one’s eye, a person there who happens to be looking.
So in my opening paragraph, which is a little too ambitious as it often is, I have mentioned, “Oh, well, you know, the watchful eye will see this.” But I think, for people who are completely unfamiliar with that convention or what I’m doing, they’re like, “It’s like an eye of Sauron.” It’s now in the setting!
Oren: waaaaaa
Chris: The watchful eye! It’s like, “No, no, no!”
Oren: That’s the reason why they can’t take the eagles to Gondor at the end. It’s ’cause of the eye. Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.
Chris: The all seeing eye. It’s like, “No, no, that was not… there’s not a big eye in the setting.” Again, another reminder that when you have your opening paragraphs and people know literally nothing about the world, everybody’s trying to impress with their opening paragraph, but the wrong metaphor, people may not know it’s a metaphor. They may think that’s literal. We’ll see what happens when the beta readers look at it.
Oren: Whereas my story, because my story is just full of silly bullshit, all I need to do is start with a scene which is fairly contained and doesn’t require you to know everything at once. So, you know, my opening scene introduces… we got a talking raven and our characters are here to break a curse for them. And talking animals. Pretty standard concept in fantasy, right? Lets people know we are in a fantasy world, but doesn’t take a huge amount of cognitive resources to figure out. And if they’re paying attention, they might notice the Norse theming, but they don’t need to yet.
And I don’t need to explain that this city is made out of the bones of a giant serpent and that my protagonist is an einherjar, but who is weird and ostracized ’cause she didn’t die in traditional battle the way the other ones did, right? That I can… I can work that in a little later.
Chris: Right. Because the immediate problem is curse-breaking, which, you know, people know what curses are from other fantasy works and various things, so that doesn’t take explanation.
Oren: Yeah. The biggest problem that I actually have encountered so far is that one of the characters is a dwarf, and that has certain implications that I do not want the audience to have. Like, I don’t want them to think that this is…
Chris: Right, it’s not Tolkien, it’s not D&D.
Oren: Yeah. So in that case, I focused on trying to describe the unique way that dwarves look in this setting to try to signpost that, like, “Hey, this isn’t Gimli.” You don’t expect Legolas to be around the next corner. Will it work? Who knows? I guess we’ll find out eventually.
Chris: I mean, that is one of the reasons why I advise, if your world has both fantasy and scifi elements, to try to introduce them together, if possible, so you don’t set completely wrong expectations about what kind of world it is. Just because the risk is, if you introduce fantasy elements and people are like, “Okay, this is a fantasy world,” and then suddenly you have a robot walking around, that could feel really random and contrived. Because they haven’t seen enough of your world to be like, “Oh yeah, everything, all the fantasy elements are robotic. You know, that unicorn over there is also a robot. I just wasn’t told,” or whatever it is that you’re doing to unite those things together. So if you introduce them at once, it helps set those expectations.
I do think it’s worth talking about… Okay, every story has its own unique requirements, but there are some things that we generally try to introduce pretty early on in most stories. So things like who the main character is and the very general type of world, which just means: Is this like a historical-ish fantasy world? Is this future/scifi? Some very broad strokes, which I think is one of the issues you’re having, actually, with the dwarf and just the fact that your character’s a fish out of water.
Oren: And just generally knowing the genre of a story is helpful to me if it’s like a setting-based genre. One of the things that was annoying about reading The Blade Itself is that, from the prologue, I actually couldn’t tell if this was fantasy or science fiction, because the guy is in a forest and he has a melee weapon of some kind, but it doesn’t describe what he’s fighting. There are bad guys, but I have no idea what they are. And he has a kind of modern-sounding name, which made me wonder if he was supposed to be like a crashed pilot or something. And eventually you find out, no, this is a fantasy setting. But it was weird how long it took. And the main reason I think was that it just refused to describe what his enemies looked like. You know, they’re just called the Shanka. It’s like, “What is that?” What does that look like? And it just does not say. It is just a blank void that he’s fighting for, like, the entire intro.
Chris: And then we find out they’re basically just goblin/orc generic.
Oren: I think they might be lizard people. I don’t know.
Chris: Oh, are they?
Oren: Maybe? I forget. But they’re basically… they fill the same role as orcs, right? They’re, like, a generically evil humanoid race that we can kill and not feel bad about. Which, regardless of whether I think that’s a good idea to have in a story, if I had known that’s what they were, I would know we were in a fantasy setting and that would help me set my expectations properly, whereas, since I didn’t know, I was feeling disoriented and having a harder time tracking things, ’cause every time something was introduced, I had to think, “Okay, is that being introduced as a scifi element or as a fantasy element?” And I don’t know which one it is. And that just took a lot of extra work.
Chris: I mean, otherwise at the beginning, if I did an example rework where I added information in there, I have an information management series, and in the last one, as an example of how you work an exposition, I made some tweaks to that opening. Because, you know, having the main character fight some of these… what are they, Shanka or Flathead? They’re also called…
Oren: Shanka. Yeah, they use those terms interchangeably.
Chris: That’s the other issue, is there’s more than one term for them, which is a very bad idea. Whatever they are. It’s not a bad way to open, especially just since we’re out in the wilderness, we’re just doing a one-on-one fight. I mean, information-wise, that’s not too hard. Starting with action does make working in information a little more, you know, complex, because you don’t want to just pause a fight for a paragraph of exposition. You want to keep the pacing pretty tight. But if their information needs aren’t too high, you know, that can still work out okay. But it just feels like Abercrombie’s not trying. Not trying to tell us what we need to know.
Oren: I’ve only read two Abercrombie books, and they both had this problem. The other one was The Devils, which was to a lesser extent, but in this one, the issue was that I was struggling to figure out, “Is this a fantasy setting or an alternate history setting?” And I eventually figured out it’s alternate history, but it’s really hard to figure that out, because it talks about a lot of things that are just made up, but then it also has the Mediterranean, like a real ocean, and then it mentions, you know, Ravenna and Venice, which are real cities, and I still have no idea how the timeline in that world is supposed to have shaken out. That took me a while to figure out what was going on.
Chris: I mean, I’m a big fan of doing a lot of micromanagement when it comes to introducing information. So if you’re introducing something in your world, like I’ve got one of my major organizations, for instance, you know, there’s a lot of things about that organization, but it can really help to just word by word, you know, exactly what do people need to know? What do they not need to know? You don’t have to juice everything about that world element at once.
And again, I always emphasize a particular focus on names, because names are the hardest, because people have to memorize them to understand them. And so simply not naming something, whether it’s a particular place or an item or anything that you’ve just given a formal name that somebody would have to learn and then recall later, is really helpful. So, you know, if you’ve got your city that’s, like, in these bones of the World Snake, for instance, you could just start with, like, “Oh yeah, everything’s made of bone,” and wait then, for instance, to talk about the rest of the city, which is really cool.
Oren: My favorite is occasionally an introduction will introduce things wrong. Just like tells you something that just ends up not being true later, and I always wonder what’s going on there, you know? Did the author revise things later and forget to change the prologue, or does the author think something else is going on? I recently finished the Final Architecture trilogy, which you did a critique of the prologue, and that prologue is not only confusing, the information it does give you is the wrong information.
Chris: Is it untrue or is it just not relevant to the book?
Oren: Both. For one thing, it’s spoilers, I guess, for this book, it’s really coy about the Intermediaries and acts as though Solace, the POV character, doesn’t know what they are, but by that point in the timeline, the first Intermediary is already famous, and we find this out much, much later. So the idea that she wouldn’t be able to make that connection is kind of silly. So I don’t know why we acted so coy about the Intermediaries. Then… that’s the one that’s just kind of straight up wrong. Then it also just sets the wrong expectations, because in this prologue they blow up one of the big evil alien monster things. They just destroy it, and this sets the idea that it’s possible to destroy them with enough effort and they never try that again in the entire series. Instead, their strategy for defeating the bad guys is all based around trying to psychically get them to go away, a thing which happens off-screen after the prologue, and I’m just baffled.
Chris: Right. That’s so damaging to the story too, then, because didn’t you spend the entire time like, “Well, why don’t they just blow them up?”
Oren: Right, I was wondering that the whole time! Why are none of them thinking about trying to blow these things up? It’s not like it would be easy, but it seems like it’s at least worth considering, since none of your other options are working. And I just… at some point, I think Tchaikovsky just changed his mind and decided, “No, this is not going to be a book about blowing up the monsters. It’s going to be a book about psychically convincing them to leave.” Which, okay, but why didn’t you change the prologue? It’s so confusing when they start talking about that as something you can do, ’cause this happens in a time-jump-like prologue, then time jump to first chapter, and in that time jump, they first come up with the idea of using psychic powers to get the monsters to leave.
Chris: I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if Tchaikovsky thought that it was suitably dramatic for the intro and just wasn’t thinking about how it would affect tension or distract readers.
Oren: Yeah, that’s possible.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. Something that some writers do is they just want dramatic lines in their opening, and whether those lines are accurate, you know, this is… I often talk about the inflated hook, right? Where somebody says something really dramatic that just turns out to be completely untrue as soon as you start the next chapter.
Oren: “I wonder what would happen if I jumped? Would anyone notice?”
Chris: Yep. Oh, man. That’s from Shield of Seiros, and it just turns out that this is a thing that she’s done a number of times, so questioning “What would happen if I jumped?” turns out to be very silly. And you know that by the end of the first chapter.
Another one I keep thinking about is The Alchemist, where there’s a chapter that ends with the character being like, “And then I saw, you know, a crime that changed the whole world.” Then it turns out the next chapter, a guy’s, like, stealing some books or something.
Oren: Yeah, that changed the world forever, technically speaking. By the Butterfly Effect. Every action changes the world forever, Chris. That’s just, like, logic.
Chris: And it’s just a really… you know, a really dramatic statement. And it’s clear that some writers are doing this on purpose, right? I guess they’re just not thinking about the experience of when you find out they just lied.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, I’m sure in their heads it makes sense. I could be wrong. I doubt most authors are that calculated about it.
Chris: I’m sure they’re thinking about just that they’re selling it, right? That they’re creating drama in the narrative. It just… and I don’t know, maybe some readers aren’t critical enough to think about it, or if you go away at the end of the chapter, and the next chapter, maybe you forgot what was promised earlier and are not keeping track of how accurate things are, I don’t know. But people are different. Some people notice those things a lot more than others, but yeah, I’m not a fan anyway.
Oren: Well, I mean, I personally think you should definitely write your book with the assumption that people will not notice when you’re being dishonest to them, because you know that’s a really great strategy. Trust me, it works fantastically.
Chris: Another thing that’s interesting to think about is I’ve seen a number of books lately that to solve world complexity, they have basically an opening teaser, or even like a full prologue, which is just a bunch of world exposition.
Oren: Yeah, they do that for some reason. I don’t know who’s letting them.
Chris: I mean, it’s a good question. I do wonder if this is happening because, you know, readers report being really confused in the beginning, you know, and ideally that would be sorted out… Again, I don’t know what everybody’s process is. I know that there are a number of really popular authors that do have a huge crew of fans, like fifty, a hundred people who are their beta readers that can help them sort out all of the confusion issues. But obviously not everybody has that. And so, I do wonder if sometimes, you know, an editor looks at it, but beta readers don’t. And an editor’s not always… Again, they might be too close to it. They might not always know.
Or another thing: always keep in mind, whenever you are tempted to blame an editor for mistakes in somebody’s novel, you don’t know what it looked like before the editor changed it. So there could be a book that needs multiple rounds of editing. The editor did their best to fix confusion issues, but there were still some left.
Oren: Plus thanks to Anne Rice, we have a very public example of how authors sometimes just ignore their editors, and if they are established, they can do that. And, you know, I appreciate that she wrote about it on Facebook, so now we know. Otherwise it’s all behind the closed doors, right? Probably not a great experience for her editor.
This post will be out by the time the podcast drops, your critique of Lightlark. Isn’t that the one that its initial publication did not have this worldbuilding prologue and then the more recent ones did?
Chris: Yeah. So we found other copies of it that didn’t have world information, but the copy that I looked at had basically all the elemental magic factions listed up front and then a teaser/prologue, it was short, that explained some previous events in the world. And the funny thing about that is that that teaser was extremely confusing, so I don’t think it solved anything. My theory is that it just didn’t get the amount of vetting that the rest of the novel did, except for the first chapter also just had really blatant confusion issues where the pronoun refers to a different person than it should, that kind of thing. So I don’t know what happens there. Again, maybe it was more confusing before it was edited, and it had so many issues that not everything was ironed out. But that was particularly funny because it looked like they added that to avoid confusion, but it was really confusing in itself.
Oren: Yeah, I would love to know if that’s why they added this. Like it’s also possible to me that they added this because someone decided that this was a faction thing they could use for marketing. Like, “Ooh, which of the magic types are you? Personality test!” So we gotta put that up front, right? That’s one possibility. But I could also just see them getting a bunch of reviews being like, “I love this book, but it’s confusing,” and then someone making the decision, “All right, put a magic guide at the beginning of it. That will make it less confusing.” It’s like, “No, it won’t. But I see why you thought that.”
Chris: Yeah. I mean, both When the Moon Hatched and Lightlark have these world prologues that are just missing basic information. Like, whoever wrote them just doesn’t know how to communicate the basics, right? is just leaving them out. When the Moon Hatched just lists off a bunch of dragons and where they live, and it’s a whole bunch of proper names that you can’t remember, and it doesn’t tell you how all these things are related, so it’s just very confusing. Whereas the Lightlark intro will just be like, “Oh yeah, and the island is about to explode” or whatever. It’s like, “Wait, what?”
Oren: What… what island?
Chris: “Where did that come from? You didn’t introduce that.” And so they’re banishing it. Like, “What? How does banishing it solve this problem?” Some really, you know, basic things that, again, if the author is writing these, sometimes it’s easy to overlook things that are just obvious to you, right? You don’t know what’s obvious to the reader. You know, again, it’s always better if you can just explain things in the opening chapters themselves, especially since you can’t count on readers to read your little world intro. But if you’re going to add a world intro to avoid confusion, man, you need to at least make sure it’s clear, okay? That has to be very direct. It’s just got… it’s got to be, no matter what.
Oren: Yeah, but then we would have so much less fun stuff to critique if they did that. So have you considered that we’re actually hurting ourselves with this advice? I actually think they should have more confusing worldly stuff at the beginning. Like, I want my next epic fantasy to just start off with a long explanation of childrearing practices in this world, with a bunch of proper nouns that no one ever explains, and then I want that to never come up in the book. I just… that would make my life easier. I would have so much more content if we did that.
Chris: A contrasting example I want to bring up is the teaser for Elantris, Brando Sando’s first published novel, is his debut, although this is apparently the sixth novel he wrote.
Oren: Whoa. Baby Brando.
Chris: Baby Brando. And this one also has a world teaser, and I can see why they felt it was necessary. I ultimately concluded that I wouldn’t use it. At least It’s not confusing, first of all. At least it’s not Lightlark or something like that. But the thing about it is that the first chapter of Elantris starts right in the thick of the main character getting this very world-specific curse, right? He wakes up and, you know, notices he’s cursed. So it gets in the story right away and I thought that was a great way to start. It’s very intriguing. And this curse, has to do with this magical city nearby, that was once beautiful and then fell into darkness. And there’s these people who randomly become magical and then they go live in the magical city. The city fell. Those people were once blessed and now they’re cursed. That’s kind of how it works. And so the teaser is intriguing, right? And if you’re interested in the worldbuilding, it’s not a terrible way to advertise the book. It’s like, “Oh, it was once beautiful, the city of the gods,” you know? And then has like a little [23:22], and then it ended. Dun dun dun…
Oren: Yeah, that’s when they took up austerity measures.
Chris: But then, when you look at the first chapter, some of that information is just explaining what the city is, is just repeated again. And I think ultimately, when you look at what’s necessary, again, it’s… I like to get into that micromanagement. The details really matter here. And we didn’t actually need to know very much about the city or the blessing it used to be, to understand that the main character is cursed. We could just say he’s cursed and talk about the curse, and then be like, “And because of this curse, they’re going to throw me into the Fallen City,” and again, we don’t recommend, for long periods of time, not telling readers something that the main character knows. But for short periods in the beginning, it can be used for curiosity, right? So then it’s just like, “Oh, the Fallen City, what’s that?” And then you could go into its history as the main character is thrown into the city. So the details of the city’s history and the fact that this first used to be a blessing, we don’t actually need that to understand this first plot event.
Oren: Yeah, we just need to know this guy’s been Kafka’d. He woke up and he’s been cursed, and it’s basically the same as being a giant bug. Don’t worry about it. In fact, I think that’s how he should introduce it in the story. You’d just be like, “Hey guys, I got Kafka’d. Uh, it’s just like that book you didn’t read but have heard about in the memes. Don’t worry about it.”
Chris: So anyway, it’s a nice contrast where the teaser is easy to understand, but also isn’t really necessary, because the opening chapter does a pretty good job, and with a few little small tweaks would do a little better yet, whereas Lightlark probably needed it, but it’s also very confusing.
Oren: Yeah. Game of Thrones is one that is interesting because, on one hand, its world is actually pretty simple. If you look at it just from a magical and geological perspective, it’s like, okay, you’ve got what’s basically England, but you made it way bigger on the scale slider, right? And then you turned it upside down. So it’s not really that complicated and it’s pretty generic high fantasy times, but gritty. But the part that is complicated is all of the noble houses and all of their beefs, and that would be very hard to just jump right in. And that’s why we start with just one beef between the Starks and the Lannisters, who are also like the most diametrically opposed of the great houses, so they’re the easiest to tell apart, and as a result, it just eases us into how complicated these various relationships end up being.
Although even then, it’s still a little too complicated for Martin’s own good, because there end up being entire noble families who are theoretically important, but get no real focus for most of the books, like the Dorne. The poor Dorne. They get nothing. They’re just hanging out. They get one guy. That’s it. He was played by Pedro Pascal, though, so that is in their favor.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, political intrigue and the factions involved in that is some of the most complex world stuff. But yeah, it’s definitely helpful, if you’re doing faction conflicts, to just start the story with two. Basically, the more simple and memorable you make each faction, and the fewer people you introduce in each faction, the quicker you can introduce new factions.
Oren: That’s the eternal contradiction with factions, is that you don’t want them to seem like caricatures, but you do want them to seem like caricatures a little bit. Otherwise, they’re hard to remember. It’s like the same traits that make them seem like two-dimensional caricatures also contribute to them being distinct and memorable. So yeah, you got to figure out a way to balance that.
Chris: You know, it reminds me of… there’s this video being passed around recently, where a historian who focuses on religion on YouTube decided to do a video about how fictional religions didn’t feel quite realistic. And he has some interesting things in there, but the first thing is basically, “Oh, you know, real religions are much messier and have a blend of all of these different beliefs from these different time periods and cultures.” And it’s just, you know, there’s a reason why fiction doesn’t do that.
Oren: Yeah. Could you imagine trying to introduce all of the complexities of Christianity to someone who’s never heard of it before?
Chris: You know, I have a fictional religion, and just the idea of, “Okay, first I got to introduce these different cultures that each had their other religions at different time periods, and then I got to show how they’ve melded together into the religion characters currently practice,” and it’s just… no, that is not happening. It’s just too much. It’s too much.
I mean, I suppose if religion was like, I was super focused on religion and my main character was just doing religious things for the whole book, and it was an in-depth exploration of the belief system, right? I might be able to manage something like that, but if it’s just one element of the story, even if it’s fairly important, that’s probably going to be beyond reach.
Oren: But what you need to do is just take the Wheel of Time approach, where everyone has the same religious beliefs, but there’s no church, except there is a militant arm of a church that does not exist. That’s the approach I think everyone should take. I think we haven’t upset the religious nerds enough, if I’m being honest.
Alright, well, I think with that, we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[closing song]This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.