555 – Explaining Complex Worlds
Description
Speculative worlds have a lot going on, which is why we love them. Cool magic and meticulous technology, it’s what we live for. But oh, wow, is it hard to explain, especially at the beginning. That’s when you need to hook readers with something exciting, but if you don’t establish at least some of the world, confusion will reign. Thankfully, we’ve got some tips which are not at all based on our own difficulties!
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[opening song]
Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: And a quick logistical note: sadly, Bunny will be out for a while. She had a very exciting opportunity. That means she just doesn’t have as much time for podcasting. So we hope to have her back in the future, but we just didn’t want it to seem like she disappeared suddenly. She’s still around Mythcreants. Hopefully we will still see her at some point.
So that’s that note out of the way. Now, Chris, I have a problem.
Chris: Hmm?
Oren: My world is inside a snail that’s running laps around an infinitely dense salami stick, which was made from the Great Galactic Boar. And I need to explain all of this right away, because my protagonist is a salamibender whose power is dependent on where the snail is in its laps and is activated by recounting the boar’s great deeds. How do I explain this all in my opening fight scene?
Chris: Ugh. I’m in this opening bit and I don’t like it.
Oren: It is your fault, Chris. Your story did somewhat inspire this topic.
Chris: And yours!
Oren: Yeah, mine too, but I’m cheating. It’s easy. I took the easy way out.
Chris: So, people may be interested to know that Oren and I have been each working on a new novel, and very much in parallel; we’re about at the same stage, which has been very interesting, and sometimes doing similar things. And that has given us the opportunity to see how we’ve both planned out our openings, dealing with worlds that are pretty complex.
Oren: Yeah, see: your world is complex because it has an intricate magic system that is inextricably tied to the plot and upon which everything depends, and it has consistent rules that people can learn. My world is complex ’cause it’s full of silly bullshit. We are not the same.
Chris: I mean, it is interesting. Your world is very novel, I would say, and has lots of really interesting things going on. Is it intimately connected to the plot? I mean, I know that it is, right? Like any good fantasy storyteller, you make sure that it matters that we’re in that particular world, but at the same time, it’s not quite so tightly connected, which I think makes it easier for you to more slowly introduce the world.
I think my world is actually less complex than yours, but everything is so consolidated and dependent on everything else that I kind of have to introduce everything all at the beginning, or else there can be no plot movement until you understand the mages working for mage organizations fighting a magical disaster.
Oren: I think you should just let people be confused. I’ve decided to become one of those people who’s just like, “Don’t worry about it.”
Chris: Oh, don’t want to hold their hand.
Oren: Yeah, don’t hold their hand. Just, like, dump everything on them. I already understand it. So they should be able to, right? It’s not like I have an advantage ’cause I’ve been talking to you about this story for the last year, right? It’s probably fine.
Chris: Yeah. No, it’s going to be a whole other ball game when we get beta readers who have not heard anything about our stories. Already, I’ve had a funny experience where I am playing around with more historical language and one convention, because I’ve been listening to Anne Radcliffe, who’s a really classic gothic novel writer, and she frequently describes things by saying, “Oh, you know, the eye would follow this or that,” right? And it means one’s eye, a person there who happens to be looking.
So in my opening paragraph, which is a little too ambitious as it often is, I have mentioned, “Oh, well, you know, the watchful eye will see this.” But I think, for people who are completely unfamiliar with that convention or what I’m doing, they’re like, “It’s like an eye of Sauron.” It’s now in the setting!
Oren: waaaaaa
Chris: The watchful eye! It’s like, “No, no, no!”
Oren: That’s the reason why they can’t take the eagles to Gondor at the end. It’s ’cause of the eye. Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.
Chris: The all seeing eye. It’s like, “No, no, that was not… there’s not a big eye in the setting.” Again, another reminder that when you have your opening paragraphs and people know literally nothing about the world, everybody’s trying to impress with their opening paragraph, but the wrong metaphor, people may not know it’s a metaphor. They may think that’s literal. We’ll see what happens when the beta readers look at it.
Oren: Whereas my story, because my story is just full of silly bullshit, all I need to do is start with a scene which is fairly contained and doesn’t require you to know everything at once. So, you know, my opening scene introduces… we got a talking raven and our characters are here to break a curse for them. And talking animals. Pretty standard concept in fantasy, right? Lets people know we are in a fantasy world, but doesn’t take a huge amount of cognitive resources to figure out. And if they’re paying attention, they might notice the Norse theming, but they don’t need to yet.
And I don’t need to explain that this city is made out of the bones of a giant serpent and that my protagonist is an einherjar, but who is weird and ostracized ’cause she didn’t die in traditional battle the way the other ones did, right? That I can… I can work that in a little later.
Chris: Right. Because the immediate problem is curse-breaking, which, you know, people know what curses are from other fantasy works and various things, so that doesn’t take explanation.
Oren: Yeah. The biggest problem that I actually have encountered so far is that one of the characters is a dwarf, and that has certain implications that I do not want the audience to have. Like, I don’t want them to think that this is…
Chris: Right, it’s not Tolkien, it’s not D&D.
Oren: Yeah. So in that case, I focused on trying to describe the unique way that dwarves look in this setting to try to signpost that, like, “Hey, this isn’t Gimli.” You don’t expect Legolas to be around the next corner. Will it work? Who knows? I guess we’ll find out eventually.
Chris: I mean, that is one of the reasons why I advise, if your world has both fantasy and scifi elements, to try to introduce them together, if possible, so you don’t set completely wrong expectations about what kind of world it is. Just because the risk is, if you introduce fantasy elements and people are like, “Okay, this is a fantasy world,” and then suddenly you have a robot walking around, that could feel really random and contrived. Because they haven’t seen enough of your world to be like, “Oh yeah, everything, all the fantasy elements are robotic. You know, that unicorn over there is also a robot. I just wasn’t told,” or whatever it is that you’re doing to unite those things toget
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