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.