Worldbuilding, post one

Note from yesterday’s blog: Nothing in the blog post entitled “pants on fire” is meant sarcastically. Just FYI. Sometimes people can’t tell when I turn it off, and I am capable of humor sans sarcasm.

I have been participating in a lot of conversations about worldbuilding in sff/paranormal stories recently. Some are with people who have invented several worlds or hit bestseller lists with them or have studied them, professionally, under the auspices of grants and such, or taught them, professionally, at writing workshops with names that make eyebrows go up because they are so damn impressive. They have all manner of techniques and rules and guidelines and rants, though none, perhaps, quite as amusing as the friend who said to me, “seven rules and a monster.” Some discussion are with newbies, or even concerned bystanders, like me.

For instance, last night, Sailor Boy and I were watching Return of the Jedi for maybe the hundred and fifty-third time and it suddenly occurred to me, more than two decades since my Star Wars-nuts parents first introduced me to the adventures of the Skywalker clan, that the whole lightning-bolt zappage the Emperor does is kind of out of left field. The other rules surrounding those adept at The Force (telepathy/mind control, television, telekinesis, speed, agility, and light-saber making/wielding), are clearly laid out early in the film, and though they use it in different ways (you never see Obi-Wan strangling someone telekinetically), Darth Vader doesn’t bust out some weird Force ability to show how the Dark Side powers are different. So the hand-zap thing is a bit weird, in that it doesn’t follow the rest of the rules we’ve been understanding about The Force. (And don’t get me started about how it’s all shot to hell in the new films. I think I’ve mentioned before about how SB and I plan to raise our children in a household that believes that there are only three Star Wars films, and they were made in the 70s and 80s.)

It is musings like this that led me to start considering worldbuilding and my views on it. Though I’m not writing fantasy/science fiction/paranormal, I read and watch a great deal of it, which makes me a definite armchair enthusiast. (I am reminded of a recent review that I read of SSG where the reviewer commented on my several LOTR references. What this reviewer didn’t know is that several more Harry Potter references had been winnowed from the draft.) SB has his geek card in order as well. I’m very glad we live in the Age of the Geek, is all I’m saying.

Anyway, I’ve decided that, as with everything else (stop laughing!), I must have very strong opinions about worldbuilding, I’m just not sure of what all of them are. I do know a few of them, however, so I’ll start there, and when I think up more of my rules, I’ll add to them. Think of this, then, as a work in progress. (And keep in mind also, that I am writing this from a diner near my home, as there was a fire in my building this evening and we all got kicked out.)

Diana’s Personal Worldbuilding Rule #1: There must be rules.
Vampires are allergic to sunlight. People who know how to use The Force can move things with their minds. You can use magic to do anything but bring people back from the dead (this appears to be one of the few rules in the Harry Potter universe). “There can be only one.” I don’t care what the rules are, and I don’t care if the reader knows them all — or any of them. Maybe figuring out the rules is part of the fun of reading. (Wait, I take that back. Tell the reader at least one or more of the rules. Give the poor guy a toehold!) But the writer had better know the rules. Which leads me to…

Diana’s Personal Worldbuilding Rule #2: Break the rules only at great peril.
If you break the rules, you’d better prepare us, and you’d even more better have a damn good reason. If your rule is that your characters can enter a computer game and have all kinds of neato special abilities but never break all the rules of the game, then you need to follow that rule — unless your characters spend half their time rhapsodizing about a promised messiah who will be known by his ability to break all the rules. If you do that, the audience will be waiting with bated breath to see if that Neo kid starts breaking rules that the “story rules” say he shouldn’t. (Actually, in this case, I guess you could say that the existence of The One is more like another rule.) If your rule is that in every generation, there is only one vampire slayer and another vampire slayer isn’t called unless the first one dies, then if you want another vampire slayer, you’d better kill the first one, and if you want a whole army of vampire slayers, then you’d better spend quite a while explaining how you are going to accomplish that without some kind of Flatliners set-up going on with Buffy and Faith. If you start breaking the rules willy nilly, at will and without a good reason (like the whole plot of the book depends on it), or without preparing the reader for the break, you’re going to lose us, and we’re going to decide that you don’t have any rules after all. And what is rule #1?

Diana’s Personal Worldbuilding Rule #3: There must be a reason.
This one covers a lot of ground. In fact, I’d combine it with the one above, since a lot of that has to do with the whole “must be a reason to break the rules” thing, but that one also has the preparation element, and the “what happens if you don’t” issue, so let’s move on. There must be a reason for the otherworldly elements in your world, if only because you must have a reason to mention every thing you mention. There has to be a reason you made them vampires. If not, why aren’t they just men, or elves, or ageless liver-eating mutants who live in air ducts? If there’s a magic wishing well on the princess’s property, she’d better, at some point, do something more than draw water from it. This is not unlike my favorite advice from Chekov about the gun on the wall. There HAS to be a reason. There has to be a reason that you made the choice you did. Sometime in the future, I will be discussing this in great detail. And there must be a reason that your magical element has the rules it does. It doesn’t have to be a good reason. Maybe the vampires in your book are not allergic to garlic, but you wrote that in because you really like the idea of Dracula working in a pizza parlor and taking a nip of the guests who’ve had too much chianti, which, naturally, wouldn’t be possible if they couldn’t deal with garlic. In the movie The Lost Boys, there’s a rule that says there are “half-vampires” who have all the qualities of vampires but don’t become full-fledged until they kill someone, and can be turned back if you find the head vampire and kill him. This is a weird and unusual vampire rule (though not entirely unlike Mina Harker’s experiences in Dracula, where she is freed from her trance only after the death of Dracula), but is very important to the plot, since the main character is one of these half-vamps, and so is his sexy girlfriend.