You’ve heard this before: Put down some dots and let the reader connect them.
A clearer way to put it might be: Write as if your readers have the Michelin Green Guide to your fabulous city and seaside resort. You may have to remind them of details here and there, but unless knowing about those advanced building materials or the molecular structure of some device is essential to the plot, you should write as if your readers know the world almost as well as you do.
Solving the tour guide problem can be summed up with don’t stop to smell anything. Keep moving and only use your nose—if you have to—as you run past. That will be enough.
The talkative professor problem: This is common in any story where technology, science, or some complicated social, magical, or technological arrangement plays a crucial role. The problem is that the professor usually has something important to say that underlies the whole world, and it usually affects the plot or how your characters make critical decisions. It’s also probably complicated or requires a character with some authority to deliver. While the tour guide problem is handled with restraint, the talkative professor has to be solved by breaking up a lot of information and spreading it thinly across the story. You can’t dump it on the reader in a three-page monologue. Your reader may know very little about submarines or the diseases thrown around by a particular elder god—and the particular combination of plant stems that provide immunity to those diseases, but you’re going to have to get them up to speed on the details for your story to make sense.
Weaving them in is the key, and showing them in action is the most effective way to get them into your reader’s head. That doesn’t mean you can’t have one character explain the situation to another, conveying information to the reader at the same time. It just has to be done carefully and in small amounts.
When your story requires you to convey a lot of information to the reader, think about the patience needed for gardening. If you thinly seed the details of your world, let them grow, introduce them, and reuse them in small amounts throughout the story, you will be rewarded with the most important aspect of successful world building: plausibility.
You plant a hint here and there, refer to those hints, develop them as the story progresses, and once they sprout, the reader won’t be surprised to see them. The reader will accept the details of your world as if they had always been there—because in fact they have been. Plots that pivot and change direction based on the social structure, the feeding rituals, the properties of a tree’s shadow during a solar eclipse, the strength of tidal forces, the way calendars are calculated, or any of the physical components of your world that have evolved steadily with your story—that fit organically into the whole—will ultimately have a much stronger foundation in the reader’s mind. This is where plausibility comes from. Organic equals plausible.
The erudite writer problem: There are world details that have to be baked into the story for things to make sense. Then there are world details that really don’t need to be there, and have little or no impact on the plot or character action. This is the erudite writer problem and it may be more common in alternate history or mainstream historical fiction where knowledgeable readers expect the writer to know about the rivets used to assemble Roman armor or seventh-century agricultural techniques common along the west coast of Africa. Readers may even want to learn about these. They just don’t want all the heavy details served to them in one bite. My solution to the erudite writer problem is let them ask for it, or let them look it up in a glossary or notes section. Another option is to set up a blog or an email account for one of your characters and post or respond in character, showing off the amazing stuff you know. Just don’t cram it all into your novel.
Here are a few more things to keep in mind before we do the exercise:
When you introduce something about your world it has to be important to the plot at the scene or chapter level, not necessarily to the plot as a whole. If sail cloth must have a specific coating to keep the local micro-fauna from eating it, that may not be important to the story as a whole, but it may be very important to the plot and the tension you will be building over the next couple chapters when your characters board a ship and are about to cross eel-infested waters.
Your purpose as a world builder has to fit with your purpose as a storyteller. You want the reader to turn the page, to wonder what’s going to happen next, to sympathize with or at least understand your POV characters, to speculate on the journey your characters are going to take in the world you have laid out for them, and to be satisfyingly surprised when things don’t go as planned. As a writer, you’re primarily concerned with what the characters are doing, and as a world builder your primary concern is where they are doing it and how it affects or constrains what they can do. Bring those together with the right balance, and readers are going to love your world and come back for more.
EXERCISE
Everyone understands the general writing rule “show don’t tell.” When it comes to presenting your world it’s “act don’t explain.” Especially in the opening scenes of your book.
Write the first three chapters of a new story (or rewrite the first three chapters of an existing one) without explaining anything about your world to the reader. That’s three chapters of action without stopping to fill in any details. You will have characters moving through your world, but when you come across some fact or feature that is begging for more than a couple of descriptive words, just name it (if you have to) and move on.
Keep the guidelines in mind: Write as if your reader has already been there before. Don’t over-explain. Pretend they know all this stuff. Keep the professor in the back until after chapter three. Sure, your characters are going to see things that need explaining. Hide most of it until the reader is well on her way through the story.
If there are constraining factors that limit your characters, such as a poisonous atmosphere or a curse barrier, have your characters react as if they understand perfectly well what they are up against. It’s too soon to explain their actions to the reader. Just do them.
Your purpose for the first three chapters is to maintain a reasonable level of uncertainty for the reader. (See James Scott Bell on “pleasurable uncertainty” in his book Elements of Fiction Writing: Conflict & Suspense.) Go out of your way to withhold information. Use a brief description or name only if you have to tell the reader anything at all. There will be cases where you will have to import enough meaning into a name to get the general function across to the reader—but no more. For example, if the plaza is filled with humans, androids, and mellaliths, move on as if every reader knows what a “mellalith” is. How much you want to reveal in the name itself is up to you. A reader may jump on “lith” in the name and think “stone”—or not.
The idea is that you don’t explain anything in detail until you are at least three chapters into the story. Wait until your readers have invested some time in your world. Wait until they are breathing a little bit of the same air as your characters before you reveal the cool behind-the-scenes stuff. Readers will keep turning pages because after a while it will come down to needing more of that air.
NANCY KRESS
Follow the Money
NANCY KRESS is the author of thirty-one books, including twenty-four novels, four collections of stories, and three books about writing. Her work has won four Nebulas, two Hugos, a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Kress frequently teaches writing, and for sixteen years she was the fiction columnist for Writer’s Digest magazine.
Sometimes the most useful critique session of one’s work-in-progress is also the most painful. More than twenty years ago I attended a workshop called Sycamore Hill, at which seventeen science fiction professionals submitted stories to be critiqued by their colleagues. The workshop took an entire week and was helped along by a lot of white wine. I had brought a novella that I knew was not among my best, but I thought
it was at least passable.
Bruce Sterling did not think so. One of SF’s best writers and sharpest critics, Bruce took strong issue not with the writing in my piece, or the characters or even the events, but with my future society. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said, at great length and in devastating detail. “And if it doesn’t make sense, I can’t believe it, and then the whole thing falls apart. How does this space colony work? Who makes the rules? Who holds the power? Where is the money?”
Bruce was absolutely right. Enterprises—colonies (terrestrial or not), spaceships, scientific expeditions, wars, cities, even families—are all based on economics. The economics may take the form of money, of barter, of cooperative manufacture (see Ursula Le Guin’s wonderful novel The Dispossessed), or of anything else you can come up with. But to create a convincing future or fantasy society, it needs to possess a convincing economy. Even a single person lost in the wilderness got his boots and knife from somewhere. Even a primitive society of cavemen has a system for gathering and sharing resources (see Jean Auel’s ingenious novel Clan of the Cave Bear).
But (you ask) what if my story has nothing to do with economics? It’s a story about personal relationships in the future. Fine; speculative fiction needs those. But that future in which your characters are relating to each other does not exist in a vacuum. Each character needs a place to live, food to eat, clothing to wear, rocket fuel, steel swords, hydroponic vats or vials to put the magic potions in, or whatever else is appropriate to your society. The more you know about how these things came into existence, the richer and fuller your story will seem.
I would, however, like to note two exceptions to all this. First, if your story is present-day or very near future, you can simply borrow the existing economy, which is what your readers will assume you are doing anyway. Then you don’t need to explain where your heroine got her cell phone or her Toyota. Second, if your story is very short—say, 3,000 words—you may not need to give too much thought to its economics because your focus will be tightly on one or two scenes. Think of a close-up photograph of a flower; it doesn’t matter to viewers where the flower is positioned when the picture was taken. But if you use a wider lens—a whole field of flowers—framing the picture with background becomes more important.
After I recovered from Bruce’s dissection of my novella, I thought long and hard about economics. “Follow the money,” Bruce said, and I tried. The next thing I wrote won both a Hugo and a Nebula: Beggars in Spain.
So, as a general rule: The longer your speculative fiction story, and/or the farther removed from us in time or space, the more thought you need to give to the economics behind your society. How do you do that?
I can’t overemphasize the value of knowing the answers to these questions before you proceed very far into your story. Not only will the novel be richer and more plausible, but thinking about its economic underpinnings may suggest plot lines you want to develop. If, for example, interstellar war has cut the supply of goods to an extraterrestrial colony from Earth, what will your characters now lack: replacement parts for robots? Terra-forming equipment? New clothing? Will they try to develop substitutes, raid other colonies for the goods, make alliance with the enemy to get them, or what? And how will your hero be involved? Does that involvement make him braver, bent on revenge, or a turncoat?
Ultimately, all stories of all genres come down to the characters. But characters interact with their environment, and their environment is shaped by economics. The richer your created economics, the stronger and more plausible your story will seem.
Even if Bruce Sterling never reads it.
EXERCISE
Considering the society of a story or novel you are working on right now, make sure you can answer each of the following questions:
1. What level of technology does this society possess? If it is a roughly medieval fantasy society, do they have gunpowder? Crossbows? Steel or just iron? Glass? If it is a space ship, what are its weapons? Does it have a faster-than-light drive? (If not, you need wormholes or a generation ship to get very far away from the solar system.) If this is a future or off-Earth city, what level of transportation do they possess to move around goods and people? Can you see it?
2. Where did the raw materials for this level of technology come from? Swords require mining. Spaceships have to have been built somewhere with sophisticated, extensive, and well-defended facilities. Even clothing must be woven or manufactured from raw materials. And everyone must eat. Do you need farms, hydroponic tanks, factories? Where are they? And who works them: slaves, serfs, peasant families, a laboring class of citizens, robots? Who builds habitats (tents, houses, cathedrals, castles, settlements)? One reason that Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Red Mars is a classic is because of the plausible and fascinating details of building a human civilization on Mars.
3. Now for a biggie: Who controls all this sword forging, spaceship funding, colony building, food growing, expedition mounting? Is it a government, and if so, what kind (monarchy, oligarchy, republic, totalitarian state, theocracy)? Is it a corporation, and if so, how does your corporation fit into the larger economy (national, global, intrasolar, interstellar)? Is your economy capitalism, socialism, libertarianism, some blend of those, something else entirely? (Walter Jon Williams created a fascinating economy based on calorie use.) What this means is: Who makes the big decisions in your society? And, just as important:
4. How is that economic control maintained? Through force (army, cadre of men-at-arms, police force) or laws (which usually need to be backed up by force), or social controls (loyalty, patriotism, the threat of hell, the need to support one’s family, the desire to advance in one’s profession)? In what combination?
5. Who is trying to hang on to or increase their control over everybody else? (There is always somebody trying this.) How?
THEME AND MEANING
“Science fiction encourages us to explore . . . all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision.”
—MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY
“A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.”
—P. L. TRAVERS
HARLAN ELLISON®
First, There Was the Title
HARLAN ELLISON has published more than 1,700 short stories, novellas, essays, and more. He was editor of two groundbreaking science fiction anthologies, Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions. He has written and performed as conceptual consultant for TV shows such as Babylon 5, The Outer Limits, and The Twilight Zone. Ellison has won numerous awards including multiple Hugos, Nebulas, and Edgars.
Like most comfortable, familiar old-shoe clichés, there is an important and irrefutable kernel of truth in this one: people, schmucks though they may be for doing it, do judge a book by its cover. Even I do it once in a while. I bought a paperback, Apeland, because of the cover. There was a mystery novel I spent seven dollars to purchase, in hardcover, because of the cleverness of the cover art. It was called Dead Piano. It wasn’t that good a novel, but what did the author or the publisher care by that time . . . they had me. Not to mention my seven dollars.
And after judging by the cover, readers judge by the title. Many times they read the back spine of the book, or the title on a table of contents if it’s a shorter story in question, so it’s judged before the cover. What you call a story is important.
I’ll try to tell you why. And how to do it well.
Here’s a sample group of titles. I’ve made them up on the moment. Say they’re arrayed on a contents page, each bylined with a name you don’t know, so you have no preference based on familiarity with an author’s previous work. Which one do you read first?
The Box
Heat Lightning
Pay as You Go
Hear the Whisper of the World
The Journey
Dead by Morning
Every Day Is Doomsday
Doing It
Now, unless you’re more peculiar than the people on whom I tried that list, you picked “Hear the Whisper of the World” first, you probably picked “Doing It” next, and “Dead by Morning” third. Unless you’ve led a very dull life, you picked “The Box” next to last and would read everything else before selecting “The Journey”. If you picked “The Journey” first, go get a bricklayer’s ticket, because you’ll never be a writer. “The Journey” is the dullest title I could think of, and believe me I worked at it.
It wasn’t the length or complexity of “Hear the Whisper of the World” that made it most intriguing. I’ll agree it may not even be the most exhilarating title ever devised, but it has some of the elements that make a title intriguing, that suggest a quality that will engender trust in the author. S/he knows how to use words. He or she has a thought there, an implied theme, a point to which the subtext of the story will speak. All this on a very subliminal level as far as a potential reader is concerned. And (how many times, to the brink of exhaustion, must we repeat this!?) trust is the first, the best thing you can instill in a reader. If readers trust you, they will go with you in terms of the willing suspension of disbelief that is necessary in any kind of fiction, but it is absolutely mandatory for fantasy and science fiction.
The second thing it possesses is a quality of maintaining a tension between not telling too little and not telling too much. Remember how many times you were pissed off when a magazine editor changed a title so the punch line was revealed too early: you were reading along, being nicely led from plot-point to plot-point, having the complexity of the story unsnarl itself logically, and you were trying to outguess the writer, and then, too soon, you got to a place where you remembered the title and thought, Oh shit, so that’s what it means! And the rest of the story was predictable. The title stole a joy from you.
Now Write! Page 16