You have your story idea and you’ve done some world building.  The stage is set, but who are your players?

The beautiful part about writing in the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres is that you are really only limited by your imagination and your ability to make your story believable.  The same ideas that come into play for world building (see World Building 101) also come into play for your characters.  Unlike television and the movies, you are not limited by what make-up people and special effects artists can pull off.  The page is your canvas, and you can paint whomever, or whatever, you want on it. 

What is your creation? 

Human characters are one thing, and a whole other blog posting in its own right, but sludge monsters and aliens are characters too, and ones that come with special considerations.  Though your creatures can be anything your imagination can inspire, you have to make sure that they are appropriate to the environment you have developed for the rest of your story, and again, you need to make them believable.  Think of everything.  What form does their body take?  How do they breathe?  What orifice do they eat through?  How do they move around?  What does their skin (or fur, or scales) feel like?  That is the physical side of your creation, but there is more to it.  How do they think?  What are their cultural values, if any?  What is the hierarchy of their society, if they have one?  What is the depth of their emotional capabilities?  Inside and out, this is where you match your creature to its environment, and carve out its physical and psychological attributes.

The Communication Factor

Your creature is a character.  A character must communicate to be effective, so how does it do that?  Your goal for using different creatures in your stories will be different.  Think about the aliens in the movie Alien versus the alien in E.T.  Pretty different portrayals of extraterrestrial life forms, eh?  One threatening and frightening, the other loveable and curious.  So what attributes does your creature need?  I say creature, because you could be talking about anything that doesn’t exist in our world, alien or mythological or “other,” and that comes from your imagination.  So how is your creature threatening?  How does it show curiousity?  And the issue of language is a whole other factor.  Most made up creatures will not come into being knowing English, yet for your story to move forward, dialogue will definately come into play.  So is there a way for your human characters to understand them?  Is there a device that will translate for them or something else that can make the point for your creature?  Is there some kind of telepathy that will allow for inter-species communication?  Has their been so much inter-species interaction by the time your story takes place that communication is no longer a problem?  Only you will know how this will work in your story.  Just remember that you have many senses at your disposal that you can use to convey information and emotions to your readers: smells, sounds, sights, etc.  Use them, and your character will simply come to life on the page.

Practice, Practice, Practice

As you are writing about characters not from nature as we know it, it may not come naturally to you.  So play with it.  Give yourself a scenario that you can write in a couple of pages involving one of your creatures, and just try it out.  Does your character feel forced?  Is there something about him/her that just rings untrue when you reread it?  Then change things up and try again.  Given time and a little practice,  you will know when your writing feels right, and you will know when you are just kidding yourself.  If you aren’t quite there yet, let someone else read it and give you feedback.  Writing.com has free memberships that allow you to get feedback on your pieces, so long as you are willing to reciprocate the good deed, and can be a great sounding board when you are feeling unsure or are trying out something unusual.  Just remember that you are putting your writing out there on the internet for anyone to see, and though you maintain copyright of your work, according to their site, you are still exposing yourself to some degree and you will want to be careful.

Until next time, write on!

GhOsTwRiTeR KiM

We all have a story to tell that seems to be just aching to get out.  For some of us, this need may be quenched by doing a little private journaling or public blogging, but for others of us, well, it’s gonna take a little more than that.  But putting pen to page (or fingers to keyboard) takes some preparation, particularly if your story requires some “bending” of the standardized, accepted version of what reality is.  If this percolating tale of yours happens to fall into a particular genre of fiction writing, such as sci-fi, fantasy, horror, etc., world building is essential before you ever even think about writing down your introductory paragraph. 

When a person picks up a novel and begins to read, something very important must happen in order for them to continue turning page after page: the reader must suspend their disbelief.  We have all heard this term time and again, referring to the reader’s need to believe in the characters and their situations in order for the story to stop being just words on pages and to really come to life, but when you are delving into places and eras and lifeforms that have never existed, the job of overcoming disbelief becomes ever more important.  So the task of world building must take center stage, and your job is to be as thorough in creating your fictitious setting as possible.

Location, Location, Location 

Where does your story take place?  This question should probably be answered first and foremost, because it will determine the depth of the world building you have ahead of you.  If you are in Jersey in the present day, and there just happens to be creatures of the night to be dealt with, your job here may not be so difficult.  If you are in the outter reaches of Galaxy Zambula, preparing to land on and populate a planet made entirely of chocolate pudding, then that’s a whole other ball of wax.  If your location is entirely fictitious, then you have a lot to work out: appearance, flora, fauna, the cultures…in short, everything.  Actually drawing maps so that you have a reference to work from later can be super helpful.

Laying Down the Law

For once in your life, you get to determine all of the rules of reality, and the people you create have to live by these rules.  Believability is key, though.  Just as in real life, we have limits placed on what can and cannot be, so must it be in your world.  There must be limits, and there must be consequences for wandering outside of those limits.  Not only does this help your world be believable, but it also helps the entertainment value.  What fun would a story be if any character could do anything they wanted?  Where would the conflict be?  And who would buy that?  These don’t even need to be extreme examples of limit setting either.  Example: In reality, I have a cool cell phone.  In that same reality, that cool cell phone’s battery runs down way too fast, and I pay over a hundred dollars a month for the privilege of having this cool phone that sometimes drops calls when I go up or down a hill.  In my story’s reality, the same kinds of things should hold true.  Maybe your character has some awesome lazer gun with batteries that run down all of the time too.  Just imagine the possibilities.  Keep a notebook or a digital recorder with you at all times, because once you start thinking about these kinds of details, you never know when inspiration will hit.

Damn That Gravity!!

There are some facts that cannot simply be ignored.  As gravity will always be an issue for those of us living on Earth, a story set on Earth cannot easily ignore the rules of gravity.  Bending, twisting and tweaking scientific principles is cool, but keep it plausible.  “Because I said so” is not an explanation that will hold with your readers, and again, you’re shooting for believability in a world that is unbelievable, so give your readers a reason to buy it. 

The Devil is in the Details

Be consistent - not some of the time or most of the time, but ALL of the time.  If you know anyone who is really in to sci-fi, you know how good they are at finding mistakes and inconsistencies.  For this reason, I beg of you, keep track of the details that make your world what it is.  If chapter one has a planet with two moons, and chapter five only mentions one moon, your readers will notice and you will lose face.   Keep notes, and refer to them often when you are finally down to the business of writing the story.

Many Ways to Skin a Cat

There is no direct formula for world building.  Individual stories require unique details, and how deep you will need to go will really be dictated by the story itself.  There are so many levels of world building, I thought I would give just a few examples off the top of my head to show you how truly unique each case is.

Star Wars:  Talk about going deep.  Planets, modes of transporation, life forms, languages, intergalactic governmental relations…this one had it all and is an excellent example of thorough world building. 

Harry Potter:  On its face, this one should have been easier to build: it takes place on our very own planet in our very own day and age, yet Rowling created histories going back generations, magical vocabulary, magical laws, magical creatures, herbology, moving staircases, and on and on and on - and all of it has to be able to exist under the very noses of us muggles with plausible explanation.

20th Century Ghosts (Joe Hill): One of the short stories from this anthology, whose name I forget, involves an ordinary kid making friends with a kid who is made of rubber.  He is an inflatable kid, and because of such, he had to write with crayons (because a poke from a pen or pencil could end his very life), had to write notes instead of speak (because his mouth was just painted on), and feared his best friend’s family dog (because the poor beast couldn’t tell the difference between the friend and a chew toy).  Though the story is not necessarily complex, Hill put a lot of effort into raising it’s plausibility by dreaming up things a boy and his rubber friend would do and say to each other that would make perfect sense given the circumstances.

Metamorphosis (Kafka): This is an example of much less intensive world building, but truly effective writing.  The time, setting and location are all perfectly standard, yet we have a man who has turned into a giant bug.  Kafka brings his readers into this unreality by slowly taking the bug from having human behaviors to losing all sense of his humanity entirely.  By slowly introducing the vivid insect-like behaviors over a period of time within the story, the reader can completely buy into the concept, as unreal as it is and always will be.

My Final Words of Advice

Details, plausibility, suspension of disbelief…aurgh!!  Alright, you know the big points now.  They are in your head and I’ve said what I needed to say.  Now, the number one most important thing to do when world building?

HAVE FUN!

If you aren’t having any fun, then your readers aren’t having any fun, and what fun is that?

Until next time -

GhOsTwRiTeR KiM