All language subtitles for MasterClass Neil Gaiman Teaches The Art of Storytelling - 11Worldbuilding

I think that the joy of world building

in fiction is honestly the joy of

getting to play God

because as an author you get to build

the world. Some authors do it a little

more invisibly than others. In the same

way, as far as I'm concerned, all

fiction is fantasy. It is all made up.

You are creating people who didn't exist

or didn't exist like that and putting

them into situations that they were

never in. Making them say things they

never said. It's it is an act of magical

creation

to do that

when you're starting out as a young

writer. Especially a young writer

wanting to explore the fantastic,

wanting to create places that are not.

The urge,

which you should always try and push

back against, the urge is to take places

from fiction.

You know, it's it's the the urge, the

fanfiction urge. And fanfiction is great

in its place, but if you are going to be

a young writer and you are going to want

to create a world, you don't want a

world that you borrowed from Tolken.

What you want to do

is look at the world outside.

Look at the world outside your window.

Get out there onto the streets.

Look at places. Think about the places

that you've been and then change them.

Make them bigger. Make them smaller.

If you're somebody who's only ever been

to school and you think you have nothing

to write about except school,

what would that school be like if it

covered an entire city?

What would that school be like

if it was an island?

What would that school be like

if it was floating

in the sky and people only got to visit

it dragged on the backs of enormous

birds? How do you get to that school?

That gives you a place. But it gives you

a place grounded in realism because the

moment that you start describing a

school, if you know a school, you know

the things that make schools weird and

unusual, the smell of cooking cabbage

or the smell of um sports clothes

unwashed in lockers. You know what that

place is. You know what kinds of people

are there? Every little detail that you

can steal from the world

and smuggle with you into your fiction

is something that makes your world more

real for your reader. But much more

important, it makes it more real for

you.

You need to be the one who believes in

your story. You need to be able to

believe in your places. If you are

building a world, you have to care about

the world. And sometimes you're also

going to have to stop and ask yourself

weird questions.

Even if those questions are not answered

in the text, it's always good for you to

know,

you know, where do these people go to

the toilet?

Where do they get their food from?

How much food does it take to feed a

small city?

How much farmland? Where are these

farms? Where does the food come from?

Where does it come in? And suddenly

you're asking yourself questions

um that it's good for you to know even

if you don't want ever to turn your book

into a treatise on medieval economics.

Um if you're writing something set in

medieval times, do your homework.

Go and look at places.

There's a there's a trope

in a lot of stories in the Arabian

Knights, the thousand1 knights.

There's a moment that somebody people

traveling together

enter a city

and in the crush of people at the gates

of the city they get separated

and it happens over and over again.

And it was something that had never

particularly made much sense to me

until I was in old Jerusalem

little over a decade ago with my guides.

And we had to get from old Jerusalem and

go out through one of the old city

gates. And there were thousands of

people pouring through the gates in both

directions.

And I found myself swept up and carried

away from my guides.

And when we got through the gates

and the people had dissipated enough

that I could look around and try and

find them, they were nowhere to be seen.

And I realized that this was that

moment. It's a thing that happens in

fiction.

And now I've never written it, but now

if ever I were writing an Arabian

Knight's story, I would know how that

feels. I would know what that is and I

would make it very, very believable

because it's happened to me

and I can give that to my characters.

There's always a tiny part of you as a

writer who

metaphorically

or really is standing there with a

notebook

just taking notes. And it can come out

in the worst times. It can come out in

the worst moments of your life. You can

be there in the hospital

and your friend or your loved one is

being wheeled away

and you can go, "Okay, what does this

place smell like?

How are they behaving?

How do I feel right now? How do these

people feel right now?

Because one day you're going to be

writing fiction.

And you will need that moment.

You'll need the way that the lights of

the cars glint off the broken glass and

the blood on the asphalt. one day to

make a story true.

So the action of world building,

whether you are building

New York or Los Angeles

or the aisle of sky, places that really

exist, places you might be familiar

with, or whether you are creating a

graveyard, whether you're creating an

enormous world underneath London, uh

whether you're creating a magical

America that doesn't quite might exist

in a state of heightened reality. The

action of world building is always the

same. You start with a world

and you're going to fill it with people

and you decide what's important about

the world. What's convincing about the

world? The worlds that we build in

fiction, they're soap bubbles. They can

pop really easily, but they seem really,

really solid. Anything you can say that

makes them feel real, that buttresses

them, that gives credibility,

you then assume that the author could

tell you everything else. It goes off in

all directions. But that one little

moment of reality. That one thing that

seems to be absolutely true

gives credence and gives credibility

to all of the things that you don't say

to all of the bits that are really just

sort of misty smudges in the background.

But then somebody looks at them and

goes, "Ah, but I'm sure like this thing

here, all of those misty smudges in the

background if we move in are actually

going to become craggy mountains." And

each mountain will be different. And you

know, of course, that they aren't.

They're just smudges in the background.

But that's okay because the one mountain

that we visited was real cuz it was

informed by you and a mountain

or just you and a very big hill and an

imagination.

One thing that is very important for you

to know,

but not necessarily important for you to

tell,

is what the rules are.

You need to understand, especially if

you're creating anything in the world of

the fantastic,

what the rules of your world are.

The problem with this

is that when we arrive in this world,

nobody tells us what the rules are.

Nobody hands you as a small child a rule

book, letting you know how gravity

works, how fire works, how basic

economics works,

um how people behave, what they're

expected to do.

They don't tell you that.

You have to kind of figure it out as you

go along.

There are rules. Some of them are

explicit. Some of them are implicit.

When you're world building,

you need to know what the rules are. You

need to know what the explicit rules

are, what the implicit rules are. And

knowing them,

you need to treat them as you would this

world.

People find things out by making

mistakes. You find out that fire is hot

by picking up something that's been in

the fire or putting your hand in it and

going, "Ow."

You find out that if you are given a

precious thing made of ice, you need to

keep it cold because if you put it in

your pocket, pretty soon you will just

have a wet pocket and no precious thing.

That's the way that you find out how the

rules work.

In this world,

it's always by trial and it's always by

error. So for world building,

you allow your characters to discover

what the rules of your world are, which

you know, and they discover it by making

mistakes or by taking advantage of those

rules.

Let things happen to your characters.

Let them go out and bump into things.

let them go out and make mistakes and

always know more than you tell.

Um,

you know, there is nothing more

frustrating for an author to have people

go, I don't really understand the rules

of this place

and

because it's fine. Nobody understands

the rules of New York either,

but they will find out what some of the

rules are by making mistakes and some of

the rules by hanging around with people

who seem to have figured out what a few

of the rules of New York are. And that's

okay.

Before I started writing the graveyard

book, I visited a lot of graveyards.

The initial inspiration for the

graveyard book had just been a little

country graveyard

behind a church across the lane from

where we lived. I would take my son who

was two maybe two and a half across that

little lane with his tricycle and he

would pedal his tricycle on the paths

between the gravestones.

And I remember looking at him one day

and just going, "You look so comfortable

here."

And then thinking, "Wouldn't it be

interesting to do a story about a kid

who gets lost in a graveyard and brought

up by dead people?" I thought it would

be kind of like

The Jungle Book, only it will be in a

graveyard. It will be the graveyard

book. And that

was the idea. I would have been 25 years

old. I remember going straight up to um

my office and writing the first chapter,

looking at what I'd written going, the

idea is so much better than I am a

writer. I'm going to put this off. And

it wasn't putting it off from the sense

of going, I'm going to leave this

unfinished. It was a sense of going,

okay, my chops are not there yet to do

justice to this. So, here I I have this

thing. I'll probably never look at this

first chapter again.

Um,

but I will come back to this in 5 years,

in 10 years, when I'm better, when I'm

good enough. and actually wound up

coming into it almost 20 years later

when I really figured that not only was

I not getting any better, but I was as

good as I was going to get, so I might

as well I I had no option. It was now

time to write it.

But during that period, I would go and

visit graveyards. I knew that I would be

setting a story in a graveyard and I

knew that I needed things from

graveyards so I needed to go and look at

them. So my world building exercise was

just visiting graveyards visiting Stoke

Newington

uh graveyard park which had a glorious

sort of ruined chapel in the middle

and looking at that chapel and going

right I'm going to have you. You're in

my story.

Going to Glasgow Necropolis,

which is all on a hill just outside of

Glasgow,

and going, I'm I'm taking your topology.

I'm going to take the hill. And the fact

that you're outside of the city, I like

that. That feels right.

Now, I was building

I built a world that was a graveyard in

my head.

I'd been playing around with it. I've

been building it. I've been seeing what

kind of people lived in it. I was

figuring out all of the details.

And wherever I would go, I would just

visit the local graveyard

um and see if there was a little thing

that I could take and put into the

graveyard that was in my head. Which

meant that when 20 years later I started

writing the graveyard book and I knew

that the graveyard was my jungle. It had

to be big enough and interesting enough

that I could set basically an entire

novel in this one location

that

it would be that interesting that I

would know I knew by that point what a

graveyard was. I knew why it was there.

I knew the history of them. And that

allowed me to make this a real place.

So a lot of what you do in world

building

is you do your homework, you do your

research. It's like I was talking about

with Neverware, getting to go through

the tunnels, getting shown around. Um,

go on walks, see things,

all of that. And then take notes. Use

the the voice function on your phone to

make little notes to yourself. Use a a

tiny notebook. I always, wherever I go,

whatever I do, um have impossible to get

out of my pocket.

Tiny notebooks on me. This is one. And

I will always

jot down things, little ideas. I may

never go back to them. I may never see

them again, but once they're jotted

down, they're rotting away usefully on

the compost heap of my imagination, and

they're there if I need them.

I think authors you read when you are

young

affect you on a level that is very very

primal and very different. So the

authors whose work I encountered

as a child

who built worlds

um really stayed with me

and I would look at what they had done

and uh and

puzzle over it and think about it a lot.

Tolken obviously um was a huge influence

on me. I've never actually

uh written anything in somewhere that

resembles Middle Earth, I think. Um

except for a little bit in in Stardust,

but Stardust is much more a world of

fairy tale. Um but just the feeling that

this was a place that I would recognize

if I saw it, if I went there, I would

know that I was there. The same

obviously with Narnia

and the idea as CS Lewis built an entire

country or kingdom and I knew that if I

were in Narnia I would know that I was

in Narnia. Um I'd know the people. I'd

know the way that everything looked, the

way that it felt. descriptions of huge

cliffs

um and looking down at the clouds so far

below you they look like tiny sheep and

you remember this kind of thing. Um

and then there were the writers who

would world build in a way that I wasn't

so conscious of. As an adult, I look

back and I go, "Whoa, it was a

remarkable, fascinating act of world

building." But at the time, all I was

aware of was the story. An example of

that would be PL Travers writing the

Mary Poppins stories

where I looked at it as just being set

in London

and didn't actually examine the

mechanics of the way that PL Travers

built her universe. A universe in which

you could go to a zoo or a circus of the

stars

at night. um a world in which people in

spring would appear in the park and

paint paint the trees, paint everything,

take it out of its winter clothes and

into the summer clothes. Um a world in

which things happened between things in

which the simple presence of Mary

Poppins would deform reality

and make everything hyperreal. in which

Mary Poppins acted as a bridge between

the world

of pure imagination and the way that

things should be and the world that we

lived in, the way that things were. And

all of those things

as a kid affected me hugely

because each of them felt like a real

place. I remember running into Hope

Merley's book, Blood in the Mist.

um a book which absolutely defies the

entirety of the the show don't tell

paradigm by just beginning almost as a

travalog and history of an imaginary

country of blood in the mist the kingdom

of Dorare

the town of blood in the mist and then

gradually becomes a detective story and

a ghost story a story of generations a

story of one person's struggle to be who

they are and to find happiness in an

awkward world. Um, of the struggle, the

infinite struggle between fantasy and

reality, between fairy, between poetry

and the mundane and prosaic life and all

of those things are there in an act of

worldb buildinging and an act of

geography, in an act of history.

So a beautiful book like that and that

stuff influenced me. I would sit there

as a small boy

drawing maps

influenced I think a lot by the maps in

Ursula Leguin's Earth Sea series.

There's a map in the front of these

archipelos and and I love the shapes of

islands. So I would sit and draw magical

little archipelos and islands and the

shapes of cities and worlds. Um, and I

would imagine stories set on them. And

even to this day, every now and again, I

will nip in and set a story in one of

those places on the maps that I drew

when I was 11 or 12 years old.