Mastering (Local) Worldbuilding

Could you bring the skills of Tolkien to your neighborhood? He made hobbits, individuals while giving them all attributes of their species. There are noble hobbits and silly hobbits and stalwart hobbits, but meals are important to all of them. Of course, the River folk are a bit odd, but hobbits just the same.

Hobbits, though parochial, live in relation to a larger world, both in terms of species (dwarves, elves, men), landscapes (caves, forests, plains), and histories and festivals and values. But Tolkien also tends to localize worldbuilding. Hobbits don’t go on quests very often. The go to pubs. They tend their businesses and estates. They celebrate birthdays. The warp and the woof of their lives is not adventures, it’s marketing and gossiping, and sleeping in a comfortable hole.

And therein is a lesson about writing any kind of fiction: Know the quotidian. Everyday lives provide the context from which the wonder and importance of special moments emerges.

When I lived in Maryland, I’d never seen a deer in the wild. So when I came across a small family of white tails, I remember clearly stopping the car so my children could get a good look. It seemed like a magic moment. Sadly, just the presence of deer would not evoke awe where I live now in New York. Here, they jam together for the chance to reduce my flowerbeds to stubble.

Even if you are not creating the kingdoms of Game of Thrones or a Federation of Planets, worldbuilding is your friend. My favorite example is Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty. Beers at the bar. Customers at the butcher shop. Spaghetti with Mama. Saturday nights.

There is nothing exotic, but it feels exotic. And not just because a neighborhood in America from half a century ago is rendered with such authenticity. What stands out within a world of buying lamb chops and dancing and budgeting are the relationships, rules, and constraints that shape the norm. These are deeply observed and reflected today, in terms of desperation and struggle, despite the years that have past. The same could be said of Jane Austen’s quotidian world, with its social expectations and the consequences of testing the limits. The human qualities that come to the surface when well-imagined characters face crises or opportunities that come into conflict with society can break our hearts, dazzle us, and bring insights that shape our lives.

Route 66 (co-created and written by Oscar winner Sterling Silliphant) did this magnificently week after week, establishing all the local quirks of company towns, camps, dockyards, farms, and more of American communities while still telling complete stories in 52 minutes.

One thing that’s often ignored is the physicality of the local world, including the details. This is obvious in survival stories like Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” And the humid heat of New Orleans puts the characters of A Streetcar Named Desire into a pressure cooker. But, sometimes, especially for places that have been settings for many other stories, authentic but unfamiliar details need to be brought out.

In West Side Story, the construction sites are surrounded by fences made of old doors. Posters repeat themselves on brick walls. The playgrounds are made of concrete and the buildings are adorned with fire escapes, and all of these matter to the story

Mastery of Basic Worldbuilding 1: Provide a physical environment that’s noticed.

Practice: First, find film or video (YouTube is helpful) that presents a place you’ve never been. Forget about the people and the message. Just look at the surroundings — natural or built — and list what’s fresh to you. Capture at least ten elements in enough words to communicate what caught your attention. Now, use that list as a model to make a similar list of elements about the place where you live. Strive to notice what you might ignore and to put what draws your attention into clear and interesting language.

Feel free to try this with a different time period. I’ve been watching silent movies lately. When they take place in neighborhoods I know, I often get so distracted by how things have changed, I need to watch them a second time to see the story.

Chances are good that your story will turn more on culture than nature. The rules, taboos, hierarchies, expectations, and conventions of your world will matter for an important reason: Most protagonist live (or come to live), at least partially outside their worlds. They push against the culture and get pushed back.

I love film noir because it often does this on two levels. The anti-hero usually defies the law in some way, meaning there is an assumed orderly, just society (in theory) he or she is in opposition to. Usually, that leads to the protagonist’s comeuppance in the finale. On another level, there is the gangster culture, which has its rules and raw power that ensures, for instance, that snitches get stitches.

But the forces in play because of the culture don’t need to be overtly violent to matter, as anyone who has watched a few episodes of Downton Abbey knows.

Mastery of Basic Worldbuilding 2: Create a consistent social system.

Practice: A great exercise is to delineate the unwritten laws of an organization. Every office, every school, every club of any size has written rules, but also etiquette, processes for diffusing volatile situations, topics that must be avoided, and informal measures of reliability. Think about privileges and responsibilities in an organization you’ve been a part of (or area a part of). Consider what can and can’t be said about race, religion, and ethnicity. How are personal matters (divorce, dating, grieving) handled? For these, is the authority (boss, teacher, principal) treated the same as peers? Are people with roles that more or less prestigious dealt with differently when something goes wrong? Who is not allowed at your lunch table?

In this post, I’m purposely reframing worldbuilding so it gets the prominence it deserves in mimetic fiction. An assumed world is an ignored world. And one that provides little but cliches to the story. Those who create whole worlds for fantasy, horror, and SF stories know how meticulous and consistent they have to be. They have to invent the norms and then, without violating them, surprise readers or audiences. If you are writing about a suburb in Florida or a shop on Sunset Boulevard, you are not off the hook. You need to discover what’s there (especially details), convey it to readers/audiences, and make it matter to the story.

Some people consider this to be part of developing the setting. That’s fine. I prefer to look at that story dimension separately, and it will be the subject of next week’s post.

Mastering the Actions/Reactions of Story Characters

We pay attention to what characters do. Sometimes their actions border on being contextual, when when their actions come with their roles or jobs. A waiter takes orders for food. A soccer goalie protects her goal and launches balls downfield. A father is expected to care for his children. A sniper shoots people. While, at times, these dimensions of a character may be incidental, most stories have characters doing things related to their jobs and roles. (Or, going against expectations, failing to live up to commitments.)

For most stories, there are tasks related to the story question. Often, these are apart from jobs and roles. In fact, a lot of the fun of stories is seeing people called to do unfamiliar task. Dorothy has nothing in her initial description that indicates she’ll have to kill wicked witches, but getting home from Oz requires it. Luke forms friendships and loyalties that lead him to take on the responsibility of destroying the Death Star.

And the jobs, roles, and tasks both describe the character and shape him or her, building the capabilities required to reach the story goal (or fail, in the case of a tragedy).

Mastery of Story Characters 7 - Put characters in motion.

Practice: Come up with jobs or roles that would make a character more or less ready for a goal. A Navy Seal might be better at killing wicked witches. A schoolyard bully probably would be worse. Now think of skills and attitudes required for jobs and roles and how those might be related to the ultimate goal. Luke is a farmer, but he also has piloting skills. And he doesn’t really want to get involved with the social conflict, which is something he has to get over. Somewhere, there probably is a connection to the flaw that must be overcome.

As another practice, come up with tasks that must be successfully done to achieve the main goal. Make a list of at least ten, more if your story is already drafted. Make sure some seem impossible. Also, connect them with flaws if you can.

How do we do the impossible? Sometimes, through training and growth. But most stories don’t have the space to really on that. Which is a good thing because it forces the protagonist to work with others. While not every story needs an Ocean’s Eleven team, most include allies with skills the protagonist lacks. Since  he  or she can’t do it alone, success requires cooperation and compromise.  

This helps the story in two ways. First, it broadens the range of characters, forcing together those in conflict and creating odd couples. Comedies often rely on this. And romances would be five pages long if the lovers did not have a reason to be apart and a reason to be together. Danny Simon said Sgt. Bilko worked because everyone on the diverse team had been drafted into the Army and they couldn’t just walk away. (When a follow-up series put them all at the same company, audiences had in the backs of their minds, “why doesn’t he just quit?”)

Beyond the bond, there is working though the differences. Characters need to bargain. They make tough trade-offs that both show their values and force them to change. (And often help them to appreciate the other characters.) In real life, I’d say the way I came to have deeper friendships most often was by working with other people. Including some I initially didn’t want to work with. For the inner conflicts, alliances show who the character is through sacrifice, loyalty, and commitment (or their opposites).

This is not to say that everything is win-win. Power disparities can be interesting, especially if they are dynamic. Often, in a love story, the one who is in control shifts from chapter to chapter (or even scene to scene). Lose (learn), lose (learn), win is a nice formula for empathy and delight.

Mastery of Story Characters 8 - Make characters dependent on alliances.

Practice: Write down the skills and capabilities your character needs but does not have. (This may mean taking strengths away from a too-perfect protagonist. Superman, without kryptonite, is boring.) Now give these to other characters in this story. (Expected characters, of course. But see if a few unexpected characters can be included.) Then, give these sidekicks or lovers or frenemies reasons to NOT share what they could offer. They could hold a grudge, be too busy, not see self-interest, want the other character to become self sufficient, or not clearly understand how they can help. There are a lot of reasons. Finding ones that add to the fun may be looking at alternatives or (my approach) interviewing characters.

Where there are limits, dependencies and vulnerabilities, it’s valuable to look at things going wrong. Very often, the stories we love most include a time when a friendship goes bad. So consider how the protagonist might be betrayed (or betray), how that relates to the story theme, and what happens next (healing or loss).

With all this action, reaction is inevitable. Actions are usually the results of decisions that are considered and weighed. Reactions tend to be in the moment, and are revealing in a different way. Part of actions is creating and supporting the persona — who we want to appear to be to witnesses. But reactions show the real person underneath. Whether a raised eyebrow or a punch in the face, creating a scene that elicits a reaction provides a marker for readers and audiences of how far the character has come in the story. A character who would have lashed out at someone else in Act 1 may very well have the skills to calm a situation or walk away by the end of the story.

Mastery of Story Characters 9 - Make characters react to challenges and surprises.

Practice: Think of a good, effective choice your protagonist might make to achieve the story goal (or complete a task). Now, put yourself in your antagonist’s shoes and counter that in the most calamitous way (even if it hurts the antagonist, too). How does the protagonist react? Think of both the internal response and the external response. Think of good responses and horrible ones.

Come up with surprises and revelations to hit your protagonist with (especially after an action). I used to listen to the Life of Riley radio show, and I always knew the best stuff would come after he said, “What a revolting development this is.” Make sure whatever is discovered or how badly things work out, that it really matters to the protagonist AND creates doubt s about success. (Usually, this will shatter self-confidence, if only for a moment.)

By the way, surprises and revelations are difficult to master. They can’t be arbitrary. They must make sense to readers and audiences, at least enough so they don’t feel cheated. And often, they need to be set up and hinted at earlier in the story. That could be by planning, luck (thanks to a generous subconscious), or careful rewriting. But for practice, it’s less necessary to implement these than to be able to come up with good ones.

There are more than nine things writers need to master regarding characters, but I’ll leave this here for now. Storytelling requires more elements, and it’s too easy to get lost down this rabbit hole. Besides, the other elements, in their own ways, relate to and expand on the above, potentially deepening the lessons. So, next week, I’ll have a new focus.

Mastering Discovering Your Characters in the Company of Others

Context is everything. In fiction, the heroism of a character is only clear if choices and actions are understood in the larger context of the risks in telling the truth, the attachments to others, and the dominance of the culture (especially the power dynamics.

An example: Though  Huck Finn is a trickster and a mischief maker, he only reveals himself to be deeply moral in relation to a prevailing culture. Slavery is accepted. Some people are the property of other people. Helping an enslaved person escape is morally wrong.

As readers, we find slavery appalling, but Huck does not question his culture. Yet, he makes the right decision. He chooses not to betray his friend, Jim. And it costs him.

“It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up. It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.” 

Seeing him break with his own code is cheering.  Seeing him condemn himself is heartbreaking and makes him heroic and memorable. But only because we understand the morality, law, and assumptions of Huck’s time and place.

We are social creatures, so our characters need to be. To go further into mastering characters, which is vital to engaging audiences, the cultural milieu (including power dynamics), interpersonal relationships, and the secrets kept from others, all are needed for the comprehending the story. This is especially true in terms of just how difficult the plot match-up is.

Plot-driven fiction often has cardboard characters, and it can even be successful. James Bond does not need to have much in the way of an inner life. He doesn’t need to be motivated by the wounds of his past or to struggle against a complicated moral code. This provides a good reminder that this Mastery Series does not claim that all writers need to master all these elements. But the more that are mastered, the more options for success are available, and this includes commercial fiction that may not even aspire to deep characters.

Personally, I look for compromise points. Even if I could get away with flat characters, I find it adds something to have go-tos that round them somewhat. I’m a big fan of flaws for all characters, not just the bad guys. When in doubt, I prefer the Seven Deadly Sins over the Minor Irritations (retelling bad jokes, not using turn signals, talking in theaters, snapping gum, standing too close, name-calling, and cutting the line). But I’ll take a minor flaw over perfection.

And even a minor flaw can be improved if it’s tied to a juicy secret. When a character keeps a secret, it says something about them, their values, and what the people around them care about. Also, the secret itself is a not-true-to-self element that sets up an inner conflict. And inner conflicts are the stuff of interesting characters.

Secrets need to be kept. Hiding information takes energy and forces bad decisions. And best of all, when secrets are revealed, things happen.

Mastery of Story Characters 4 - Create characters with secrets (and flaws).

Practice: Find five taboos in the world you’ve created and have one character violate one of them and keep that secret. (The violation can occur before story time begins.) Then give a character that matters the means to discover the secret. (In both cases, the more consequential the character, the better. For  romance, these characters are often the two lovers.)

Give a characters with a secret a reason to share it, but vulnerabilities that make such honesty difficult or apparently impossible.

Create a scene where a secret comes out.

(For any of these, noting where these occur in favorite stories is valuable and provides models.)

Having a good antagonists is one of the easiest ways to show who the protagonist is. In general, this means creating a villain and personalizing the relationship. Don’t resist the forces of evil. Resist one person in particular, like Darth Vader. And make the antagonist powerful and able. Make who the character is important. (Luke, I’m your dad.)

It’s also great to have friends who are alike but go too far. These point to limits on the protagonist. Or have characters who are opposites, which creates conflicts. Minions for antagonists can be valuable beyond plot. Their choices (and often their mistakes) reveal the limits and qualities of the antagonists. Making them distinct from one another (as is done in Die Hard) makes everything more intriguing.

Two more things to consider:

One is the utility of other characters. This is obvious in capers like Ocean’s Eleven, where each person on the team has a different, needed skill. They are all essential and need to deliver in that case, but it can be fun when they don’t deliver or almost don’t deliver.  

The second is building the personal relationships. Caring and disliking qualify. They complicate things. They make the protagonist’s task more difficult and reflect who he or she is.

Mastery of Story Characters 5 - Present characters in relation other characters.

Practice: Find a reason why it isn’t a satisfying ending if the antagonist having an aneurism and dying suddenly. Even if the story problem goes away. In other words, see what does not get tested or healed by the confrontation at the heart of the story if the problem is miraculously resolved.

Explore how a confidant reveals the protagonist. Holmes is less interesting and accessible without Watson. Or the confidant may be a sounding board for ideas (even pulling down the protagonist at times, as in Working Girl). Or a mentor (who usually has to disappear so the protagonist can succeed without all that help (see Obi Wan and Gandalf).

So much of who we are is determined by individuals around us and the society in which we’re embedded. (This topic bleeds into setting, which I’ll deal with later, but it’s worth a full examination here under character.) Values, framing, what we pay attention to, what we care about. what triggers us, rights, hierarchy, and power. These may be accepted, rejected, or modified inside us, but they cannot be avoided. The same is true for characters, which is why Huck Finn’s decision about Jim is so poignant.

What power does your character have or think he or she has, and how is the use of power modulated by others? What mob would your character join or avoid? What’s easy to say or do, and what takes real courage? How is non-conformity punished? Can your character get a pass for misbehavior by privilege, wealth, supporters, or a favor that’s owed?

Mastery of Story Characters 6 - Put characters in a social context.

Practice: Delineate five things related to your story that your protagonist can do easily and five that can’t be done easily. Think about how the easy ones might become difficult socially. Think through work arounds for the difficult ones. Find one possibility for courage. Then do the same exercise for the antagonist.

Write down a moral code for your world (even if it’s the one you live in) with regard to freedom, responsibilities, care for nature, charity, and authority. Are any of these challenges for you character? Can you illustrate the code being broken in your story or in your own experience?

One of the key decisions a writer must make is who the protagonist is. And an essential element of that, from the point of view of storytelling, is identifying or shaping the main character to fit the story problem. Usually, this means the character is deeply affected by the challenge, unable to avoid it, and forced to change in the confrontation. And, in general, the protagonist is not in the power position. Of all the possible characters in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien chose a hobbit. In the Bible, the fate of Israel as it faced Goliath rested on the shoulders of David.

Between this post and the last one,  the elements of Mastery provide the information about characters that can allow you to size them to the story problem. Sometimes, this may lead to tweaking a character from history or one who elbowed his or her way into an early draft. Sometimes, doing the work ahead of time can cast the role before the story is written. But, one way or another, this work needs to be done.