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NARRATOR: You've already stepped away

from our world a little bit, so don't be hesitant about really

striding away.

Get into world building and have fun with it.

Go forth and create something new.

If you're writing science fiction and fantasy,

world building is kind of essential.

It's one of the pieces that make science fiction

and fantasy different from other genre fiction.

So it's-- in a lot of cases, you're going to be writing

things that are set on Earth, which we call the first world,

but sometimes you're going to be writing things at one removed

from Earth, i.e. secondary world material.

And you want your world to feel real.

You want it to feel lived in.

And then if it does feel real and lived in,

then people are going to be able to pay attention

to characters and plot, which hopefully is what you really

want them to pay attention to, and the world will sort of

fade into the background.

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If you're building a new world, you

are able to sort of go into topics and materials that

can be a little uncomfortable for readers

to engage with when they're set in the real world.

We have personal feelings attached

to all of the politics of our world,

and politics is anything having to do with people.

So even if you don't think that you're

talking about the politics, if you've

got a story that has people in it,

you are talking about politics.

So if you're trying to tell a story about just

an ordinary kid going to school every day,

you're going to evoke emotions attached to that because people

who have gone to school are going to remember

their own school incidents.

They're going to remember what it was like to walk to school.

They're going to have flashbacks of the time they got beat up

by some bully on the way to school.

If you're writing a story set in the real world,

you may want to use those brush strokes of emotion

and deliberately evoke something that your audience is trying

to kind of meet you halfway on.

But if you're writing something set in another world

and you want people to engage just with the ideas

or just with the characters in that setting,

then you take them away from the real world on purpose.

You're doing that as a means of detaching

your reader from their own personal experiences

to some degree.

Now, because you're telling a story about people

and because stories about people always

evoke some sort of emotion, you're

still going to get a little bit of that

in there, but not as much.

And in a way, it's sort of an imagination cleanser,

and that way you can draw people into ideas or allegories

for the real world that take them

away from their own personal experiences as much.

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You need to know all the minutia, and as the artist,

that means that you have to understand the day to day.

How does a person get up every day?

How do they put their clothes on?

How do they brush their teeth?

How do they go to the bathroom?

When I was researching for "The Killing Moon,"

which is actually set in an ancient Egypt-like society,

I had to research how did ancient Egyptians go

to the bathroom because I needed to make sure that--

I wasn't planning some dramatic scene on the toilet.

But I needed to be able to say that this amount of time

is what they're going to have to allot to--

if they've got to walk a long way to get to an outhouse

or something, then I needed to kind of have that in my head.

The world builder is someone who's

going to understand that world as if they live in it.

The reader doesn't have to understand it on that level,

but you need to understand it enough to not

kick the reader out.

You don't think about how, in your kind of day

to day activities, as a person who's

just kind of going through their typical day,

they don't think about the fact that they

are exercising all kinds of really complex world building

details.

Just the simple act of commuting to work, for example.

And this is a thing that humans encounter all the time.

People who come to New York who've never been here suddenly

have to factor in learning the subway system.

They may never have done it before.

But by the time that they've been in New York for a while,

they're naturals at it.

They've got it.

And that learning process is just

part of acclimating to a new environment.

It's the same thing for a reader.

When a reader is starting to read a secondary world fantasy,

they've got to ramp up.

They've got to learn a little bit about that world.

And you try not to make the learning curve too steep,

but at the same time, you want to put them

through the same process of acclimation

to their new environment that any human being does

when they go into a new place because that's how you learn.

That's how you really kind of become part of a space.

And I was able to do that explicitly

in "The City We Became," where the viewpoint

character of Manny is a guy who's never been to New York

before and so all of this is new to him.

You know, hailing a cab, all of that.

All of these little rituals that we're so used to.

But those rituals, those processes,

that infrastructure, that's all part of the world

that we live in.

So when you're creating a secondary world,

it's got to be just as plausible and just as lived in.

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When I first started learning different methods of world

building, what I was told by many different people

in the science fiction field was that it should

be sort of like an iceberg.

90% of it is not visible.

It's below the water.

10% of it is all you kind of really put into the work.

The problem with that analogy is, first and foremost, you

may need more than 10%.

Second, the work that you put into the story that's

not sort of immediately visible is still

helping to support that other 10%.

It's important.

And suggesting that it's something

that you are going to discard or is unseen

implies that it's not important.

It also implies that it's sort of scary.

I mean, you know, icebergs sink ships,

and it's usually the part that you can't see.

And so that that's sort of an ominous way

of framing world building as far as I'm concerned.

What I want people to do is get into world building

and have fun with it.

Really kind of dig into those little details and that minutia

because that stuff is what makes the 10% work.

You can't have those 10% pieces visible

if you haven't put in a lot of effort

to make the other 90% kind of look just as good.

There's an example in "The Broken Earth" of--

in the appendices of "The Broken Earth,"

there's a list of all the seasons

that I initially put together and ultimately decided

to publish.

But, I mean, that's an example of the kind of stuff

that I'm putting together in the background

when I'm creating the story.

And so I actually created a lot more seasons that we don't see,

and you guys are getting the greatest hits of the worst

seasons.

So there's some-- in my notes somewhere,

there's probably another 20 seasons that I did not share.

The old adage goes that if you are over world building,

if you are doing too much of it, if you are drowning

your readers in your world, it is often

because you as the world builder have

become too attached to the amount of work

that you put into this.

The thinking is that you're trying

to inflict all of that on your reader

because you did so much work.

You're proud of that work.

It's nothing wrong with it, but if you

suffer for your art, that doesn't mean your audience

has to as well.

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The most common mistakes that writers

tend to make in world building beyond the attempt

to just rub the serial numbers off of an existing culture

because they're afraid to create something new

is to replicate the mistakes that other creators have made,

and that's something that a lot of us

tend to do because we are soaked in a media environment that

is rife with underrepresentation of certain groups,

or certain belief systems, or certain perspectives on life.

And so we constantly see repetition

of the same bigotries, the same biases, the same assumptions,

the same misconceptions of how the world actually works.

And it's important that a writer do enough research,

learn enough about the world that they realize

those are stereotypes or cliches,

and that they're just regurgitating them

so that they're able to at least recognize

when they're doing it.

You don't have to know every people.

You don't have to know how the entire world functions.

It is impossible, in some cases, if you didn't grow up

with a particular background, for you to understand

another group of people.

But you can at least recognize when you're getting them wrong

or recognize when you're possibly just replicating

an existing cliche and go research that and try

and make sure that it's actually a true thing,

or if it's not a true thing, depict

what actually is a true thing.

But that's when you take a culture that exists,

you decide that you want to create

a society that looks like ancient China,

so you pick an era of China.

You write your characters as aliens,

but they're dressed in clothes from that era.

They speak to each other as if they're from that era.

They have a societal structure that resembles that era,

but they're all bug eyed aliens from the planet Flox

or whatever.

And that's lazy.

It's also treating real people like props and a real culture

like a prop.

And if that's your goal, if that's

what you want to do, if you're trying to critique

that culture, ideally if you're from that culture

and can critique it, then sure, OK, go ahead.

But there's no reason to kind of go with an existing society,

especially if you're talking about a world that isn't Earth,

or a world where things have happened that don't happen

on our world, like magic exists, or there's

unusual high levels of seismology,

or something like that.

You've already stepped away from our world a little bit,

so don't be hesitant about really liked striding away.

Don't make that a little baby step and then freak out,

and back up, and then retreat to the familiar world

that you know.

Go ahead if you're going to do it.

Go forth and create something new.