Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve decided what type of world we want to build and looked at some important aspects of that world, but how do you make your world live?

I’m a character-driven writer so the first thing I look at is:

1. How do your characters interact with your world? A lot of the world can be shown by seeing the characters as they go about their daily lives or move from one area to another, or talk to someone else, or confront something that’s taboo.
   After that, I fill in the gaps:
2. The personalisation and nominalisation of world aspects makes it real. A very easy way to personalise your world is to go to the markets. It’s a perfect way to show how the society works very quickly without a boring info dump. If your world doesn’t have markets, choose something that shows a number of characters from different walks of life and how they interact with each other.
3. Remember the detail. Most of the time, broad strokes are fine when painting a picture of your world, but the truth is in the detail. Sometimes, it’s the fact that a man’s fingernails are dirty, or someone has a stylised tattoo around their wrist, or the tankards are made of bronze rather than wood or pewter. Perhaps it’s the barmaid who wears a blouson top and gathered skirt, and a small antenna sticking out of her mob cap.
   

Next week: what needs to be different, what needs to be the same?

We decided on the type of world we were going to create last week. This week, I’ll look at what aspects of the world are important.

Think about the types of things we need to see in a scene that help us orient ourselves as readers. I look at four main things:

1. Social structure and behaviours. Everyone lives in a society. What does yours in your world look like? What’s the ruling hierarchy? What’s the political structure? Who has the power? Who doesn’t? What does this look like?
   
2. Clothing. What types of clothing are worn? What’s the difference in clothing between those with power/money and those without? How do they get their clothes? What types of fabrics? Who makes them? What kinds of controls/social expectations are there on clothing? Do the same process with food and other common things (books/reading).
3. Landscapes. What does the land look like? Is it flat, mountainous, rivers, valleys, deserts? What colours predominate? What does it smell like at different seasons? What causes the smells? How do the characters interact with the landscape? Are they farmers or miners, etc?
   
4. Transport and other technologies. How do people in your world move from one place to the next? Are there differences in modes of transport between people with power/money and people without? Are there different modes of transport for different reasons or distances? What other technologies are used? How do people communicate with each other? How do they prepare food? Do they read? Are books on parchment, animal hide, paper, plastic, or some other substance? Is everything electronic? If so, what form does this take? I find Dr Who is great for ideas with this aspect of world building. There are so many different ideas in any one series, sometimes in just one show.

Make sure you know what parts of the world are different to contemporary earth. Some of these things can be understood by readers by the way characters act. Some things will need to be explicitly shown.  

Next week, I'll talk about how to bring your world alive.

I’ve been in a situation lately where I have no writing time at all. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on my writing. I just haven’t been able to write anything down. It’s all in my head. I’ve decided the best way to use the limited time I have (usually when I’m driving from one place to another) is to create a new world for a new story.

What things have to be in place for a new world to feel believable to readers? I’ve been making a list and imagining the answers for my new world.

The first thing that needs to be decided on is what type of world you need. There is a wide range of worlds you could choose from. This list is just the types I consider. There might be more.

1. Contemporary earth. This is a world very similar to the one we live on. There’s very little to create in this world as we already live the life. All we need to do is populate it with our characters.
2. Futuristic earth. I find setting stories in the future problematic. I keep thinking of two books that were set in the future. One of them is 1984 by George Orwell. While there are elements of that book that have come to pass (at various levels) in our society, there’s more that hasn’t. Orwell grossly overestimated the development and adoption of technologies in the thirty or so years after writing the book. The other book is The Oceans of Venus by Isaac Asimov. While that book isn’t set on earth, it was still set in the future, but it was based on incorrect information. Scientists of the time speculated that Venus’s cloudy atmosphere hid roiling oceans of water. It wasn’t until decades later that they found that assumption to be totally wrong.
   
3. Past earth. You’d think this one would be relatively easy, but it’s not. If you think in broad strokes, there’s a lot of information available that we can build images with. Archaeologists and historians have reconstructed different times in history, sometimes in detail, but there are a lot of eras where there are gaps in the information available about certain societies. Take the Saxons for example: their dwellings were wooden, so pretty much the only evidence we have of them is dark splotches in the soil left from posts, and pot sherds. A lot of information about their lives is conjecture.
4. Fantasy earth. Things like Steampunk fit in here really well. You have the earth we know, you have some of the same history, but somewhere along the track, things have taken a sideways turn and everything is fantastical.
5. Fantasy other world, Contemporary other world, Futuristic other world, Past other world. I’ve put all these together because they have similar situations and difficulties as earth in each of those times.
6. SF other world. Once again, The Oceans of Venus jumps into my head. Of course, we know a lot more about other planets and potentialities for other planets and galaxies, but there is always the probability we’re going to get it wrong. The trick to making these worlds believable, I think, is to have a mix between what is known (our world and science) and what is unknown and possible.
   

Next week, we'll look at important aspects of our new world.

Every story, short or long, has certain similarities. They all have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes, that’s where the similarities end.

A short story has a very different structure to a novel. There’s so much to fit into a short story that the structure has to be precise and the writing very tight, otherwise you risk presenting something that seems to ramble all over the place and never seems satisfying. The invitation for the reader can be light and happy, or it can be tense and immediate, but no one stays for long.

A novel does all those things, but a novel delves deeper. It has a deeper, more complex plot; deeper, more involved description; deeper, more fully rounded characters. It can be punchy, but it can also invite the reader in to stay a while. Sometimes, readers stay a long while… that’s were series come from.

I haven’t been writing much lately, and don’t anticipate being able to write anything worthwhile for a while yet. Stepping away from writing is a necessity. There are other things in my life that I have to put my time into right now, but I can’t let the writing go. It’s an integral part of who I am.

That’s why I’m looking at structure. I can skip through that in five minute slots that don’t tear me away from what I need to be doing right now, and I can still feel connected to who I am.

This week I’ve been thinking about structure. Structure is one of my weaknesses. I have to work hard at making sure my stories have all the elements they need to give them body and cohesion. I’ve been looking at three types of structure.

One of the structures I’ve been looking at is a linear one. It’s an eight step process published by Stephen May and Nigel Watts in their book Write a Novel and Get It Published. It goes something like this:

1. STASUS. What is the world like before things begin to happen?
2. TRIGGER. What happens to set things in play?
3. THE QUEST. What does the hero/ine have to do to return things to the stasis point?
4. SURPRISE/S. What things happen to prevent the hero/ine making things right.
5. CRITICAL CHOICE. Things get so bad the hero/ine has to make a choice to follow a specific path to achieve a new kind of normal. What are their choices? What decision do they make? Why do they make the choice they do?
6. CLIMAX. The critical choice has consequences that might not have been expected. Everything is much worse now and we don’t know how the hero/ine is going to get out of it at all.
7. REVERSAL. These are the consequences of the critical choice. What does the hero/ine have to do now to make things right?
8. RESOLUTION. The new normal.

I’ve used it before and, while it works to an extent, I found it limiting. I imagine it would be very useful for people who don’t understand how stories work, that there is a need for building tension and critical choices to be made at various points to maintain reader interest. I imagine a lot of literary authors shun the Three-Act Structure because most literary stories I’ve read don’t have the leaps between choices and consequences that a lot of story structures recommend.

The third structure type I’ve been reading about is The Hero’s Journey. Its stages are:

1. THE ORDINARY WORLD.  This relates to the stasis from the eight-point story structure, but the focus is very much on the hero and often includes some foretelling.
2. THE CALL TO ADVENTURE.  This is the trigger but, once again, very personalized and focused on the hero.
3. REFUSAL OF THE CALL.  The hero refuses to be part of the adventure for various reasons. I find it useful to match the hero’s character arc into this.
4. MEETING WITH THE MENTOR.  Someone older, wiser, or with a different outlook makes the hero understand certain points which lead him/her toward accepting the challenge.
5. CROSSING THE THRESHOLD.  This is a transition point that links with the Three-Act Structure. The hero makes a decision that leads him/her to accept the challenge. The world is in flux and no one knows what’s to come. 
6. TESTS, ALLIES AND ENEMIES.  The hero is tested and determines who is friend and who is foe. This section can be repeated until the hero has gathered all the knowledge he/she needs to become who they need to be to succeed.
7. APPROACH.  The hero and newfound allies prepare for the major challenge in the Special world.
8. THE ORDEAL.  This one equates to the Critical Choice of the eight-point structure. It generally falls just after the middle of the story, where things have been getting progressively worse and the hero has to do something different to change the expected outcome. It leads to the second transition point, which lies at the end of Act II in the Three-Act structure.
9. THE REWARD.  The choices made during the ordeal have given a different result, probably the result the hero wanted, but they aren’t home-free yet.
10. THE ROAD BACK.  This is the second transition point. It’s come about because of the ordeal/critical choice. There’s another challenge for the hero to overcome; one he/she hasn’t anticipated and that test them more fully than any other challenge has.
11. THE RESURRECTION.  The final challenge. The climax. Whatever happens here sets the scene for what the new world is going to look like. It’s rife with danger and no one is sure what the outcome will be when the hero wins.
12. RETURN WITH THE ELIXIR.  The hero’s decisions have achieved results. Whatever he/she has done has led to the beginning of a new normal for everyone. Here is where everyone begins to look to the future.
    

I’ve used this story structure very successfully, most recently with my fantasy novel Warrior Pledge. I had originally written the story using the Three-Act Structure, but it was flat and predictable. When I overlaid the Hero’s Journey over top of what I’d written I was able to identify some serious gaps in the narrative, and also some things that were out of order. Once I’d written/rewritten those sections, the story was much more nail-bitingly tense, the characters were more compelling and the narrative was much stronger. I didn’t use the diagram for the hero’s inner journey, but my characters naturally fell into that development.

The Hero’s Journey fits seamlessly with fantasy stories, but it can also be applied to contemporary tales. It’s all to do with your interpretation of each section.

Images from:
Hero's Journey: http://www.thewritersjourney.com/hero%27s_journey.htm
Three Act Structure: http://jordanmccollum.com/2009/09/story-acts/