"World-building" is a phrase that sets my teeth on edge, most prominently when someone praises a fantasy book.
"World-building" is supplemental to storytelling. It's what you worry about after you've gotten the story right.
If your primary praise for a writer is for his "world-building", the writer has failed to tell you a story.
In particular, a new system of magic or a intricate cosmology or a systematic implementation of werewolfism isn't good writing.
I love Dave Duncan's "A Man of His Word" series, but I love it because it's an entertaining implementation of the "Princess and the Stableboy" archetype, with characters I want to persevere through their difficulties and conflicts that make sense. The geography and human subspecies and magic system are interesting, even novel, but wholly subordinate; the story is primary.
"World-building"? The Silmarillion is world-building, and it is unreadable. The Hobbit is a story.
Not that I have a strong opinion or anything.
Posted by Greg at February 1, 2007 4:42 PM
And yet bad worldbuilding can make books fail to allow me to suspend disbelief, I have to often revoke the suspension after it has been provided.
Harry Potter presents a school with approximately 40 children in an age cohort, and students are there for 7 years. Some but not many do not finish. There are 14 professors and average class size for younger students seems to be about 20. So, it's reasonable that these two pieces of information point to a student population between 250-300. Rowling states elsewhere that it is around 1000, but doesn't say why.
All wizards in the British Isles receive an invitation to attend Hogwarts at age 11, but "some" do not attend. Assuming an 80% matriculation rate, there are 50 wizards born per year. Assuming an average lifespan (in non-Voldemort eras) of 150 and a stable population, there should be 7,500 wizards in Britain. Yet, the Quidditch world cup stadium seated 100,000 wizards. Given a similar wizard birth ratio in the rest of the world and that the UK is 1% of world population, there are 750,000 wizards in the world, so 14% of the wizarding world was in the stands, including children, infants, the criminals and the insane. Well, it is the most popular sport in the wizarding world.
Wizard economics is another matter. How do people who can make something out of nothing or who can make a place undetectable by muggles ever end up as "poor"? It can only be by choice.
So, bad worldbuilding can break me badly. Even if I like the story, it's easy to screw the pooch.
Hey! I was looking for an image of a staff at google and I ended up looking at one of your miniatures, a red wizard, so I came in to check you blog, hoping for more RPG stuff and found this text about World-Building. I happen to be A D&D Dungeon Master and I think that what you wrote here is really good! This might actually be my problem as a DM, I always worry too much about World-Building and right now I'm sort of stuck when I try to create the story, so yeah... I'll think about this next time I create something for my players! The Silmarillion and The Hobbit examples were just great..
Well.. just thought you should know, thanks for the help anyway!
I'll just keep searching your blog for a while =)
Michael:
Yeah, JKR is a good example of bad world-building, but she got locked into some things (like Quidditch, which has epicly stupid rules) by her first book, when her skills were at their weakest. Of course, the books are wildly popular, which supports my point that world-building it not that important.
Individual readers will have different tipping points. Amber's a good example, based on the acceptance/rejection of the world-building in the second series.
Andrew:
Yep, you're on the right track.
A friend of mine uses me as a story consultant from time to time, and he'll explain to me the new paradigm he's worked out with this group here wanting that and that group there wanting some other thing and I always respond, "That's great, that'll work. Now tell me a story with it."
DMing is a special kind of storytelling because it's cooperative--the DM and the players need to tell the story together. If the DM tells the story, you worry that the players are going to feel left out, ineffectual, and just along for the ride. The PCs need to be the most important characters in the story, because they're the ones that do things.
You can tell a grand epic story about stopping a war, defeating a great demon, and destroying an evil artifact, but you need to think about how the players can stop the war (escort a diplomat through dangerous territory, save an enemy commander), defeat a great demon (go on a quest for his weakness, find the dwarf who can forge it into a weapon, and wield that weapon in battle against him, and destroy an evil artifact (steal it from the evil monks who guard it, take it to the hidden gate, and bury it beneath the celestial mountain). And, as importantly, you need to worry about why the players want to do these things.
Showing up to the game and saying "in today's adventure, you escort a diplomat through dangerous territory" isn't very motivating. Make the diplomat a relative or a friend; make the war something they want to stop, because it threatens their homeland. Or let them learn that the war is based on a mistake or a lie and give them the chance to expose the truth.
Also, listen to your players. Ask them what they want their characters' stories to be--what they want to accomplish. If all they want is to be stinking rich, you don't want to present them with a grand epic; but if one of them wants to be a legendary heroic paladin and one of them wants to be stinking rich, then you get to do the grand heroic epic, but you have to remember to have big piles of treasure, too.
Anyway, that's my advice.
Wow, did you just put yourself forth as a person with worthwhile opinions about fantasy writing and praise A Man of his Word in the same post?
Bold.
Yes. Yes, I did. Bold is the word for me.
Thats a great advice! Definitely changed the way I used to create stories.
Thanks a lot Greg ;)
Bet you didn't like the Cap'n Crunch scene in Cryptonomicom either...
This is a topic near and dear to my heart. In writing a reply to Greg's post and the various comments here, it soon became long enough that I decided to just make it a post to my own blog. So, if you're interested, please check out my response here.