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

In case you haven’t prowled the shelves of Wal-Mart, Target, or Toys-R-Us recently, here’s a list of just a few action figure lines available right now. I’m a figure collector, and to be blunt, besides some of McFarlane’s always-intricate and interesting lines (most of which aren’t even in regular toy sections– check Hastings or collector’s shops in malls for those) it’s been a typical year so far. You’ve got the same old Spider-Man movie line, trying to milk a little more cash out of the franchise even while it doesn’t have a movie coming out, and there’s alway a new Star Wars line, but they also usually look about the same. So here’s some of the new stuff, all of which can be found at Toys-R-Us.com if you don’t care to get out and find it yourself.

The Good

As I’ve said in previous blogs, Marvel’s having a really good year. Not only have they released two top-notch films in the same continuity, but that quality seems to have leaked over into their action figures as well. There’s nothing just brilliant about these figures but they’re nicely detailed, pretty realistic and come in brightly-colored, eye-catching boxes (important for collector’s like me who rarely open a new figure).

The Iron Man toys are immediately eye-catching because they’re not in your basic box. They’re on a flat card as usual, but at first glance, the plastic makes them look round, and the reds really jump out. These are 5.5-6″ figures, the perfect size to get a good amount of realistic detail and fun playability for kids who will take them out of the box. It’s hard for a figure to have much articulation if it’s too small, so when I was a kid, I never like my figures to get any smaller than this. The best thing about this line is that every figure looks like something out of the movie. All 3 of Stark’s various suits can be found, and there’s no obnoxious, weirdly colored versions. Just wait- we’ll get to those with Batman.

The Hulk figures look just like the Iron Man figures to me. Great articulation, great size, excellent box.

The toy shelves are looking a little more like they did when I was a kid with all the Ninja Turtles figures out, and it’s been like that for a few years now with the recent cartoon series, and now especially with the film last year. But for the first time ever, you can get a four-pack figure set of the original Eastman and Laird comic style Turtles. Beautifully colored like the original covers and wonderfully articulated, this is a very neat collector’s item and one fan’s have waited for a good long time.

The Not-So Good

These aren’t especially bad figures, but they’re not especially good, either. These represent the kind of mediocre toys I’ve seen every year since I was a kid. Some of them may even be worth picking up if you’re a big fan of the series, but more detail, thought, and marketing strategy really could have been used with these.

The new Indiana Jones line follows the Star Wars tradition of 3.5-4″ figures, and again, I think this is too small for much detail and definitely for much articulation. What’s neat about them is that they aren’t just from the new movie– a number of characters from all four films are included and it’s a very extensive line. I would guess the idea with these and Star Wars is the same: smaller figures so that more individual toys can be made. They can do more characters and keep their costs lower by using less material. That’s probably why 5-6″ lines usually have a dozen or less figures.

Worse than the size, though, is the package presentation. Somehow, this box manages to make it look like the figure doesn’t resemble Harrison Ford at all. He looks a little thrown together, and if it weren’t for the label, we might not even know it was supposed to be Indiana Jones.

But take a closer look at the figure itself. I don’t know exactly what’s wrong with this packaging, but it’s managing to make the figure look much worse than it really is. Maybe they should have put the hat on him.

The Dark Knight line really looks pretty good– good size, excellent detail– but the box is lame and isn’t eye-catching, and the figures are really hit-and-miss. There are several versions of the figure pictured above, and despite my qualms with the new costume, these are great because they look like the suit you’re going to see in the new film. But every Batman line has a number of goofy, weirdly colored suits Batman himself would NEVER wear, and why do that with a darker film franchise?

I just don’t think Christian Bale would make a good Power Ranger. And I get it. The assumption is that kids like to play with brightly colored figures. Maybe that’s true, but I had an extensive collection of Batman figures growing up, I played with them all the time, and I always wanted to create stories with my figures that seemed authentic, at least to me. I loved Batman comics and I loved the films, so why wouldn’t I want my Batman to look like BATMAN?

Sometimes the new Joker looks cool, and sometimes he looks like this… anyone who’s been in a cave for the last two years might take a look at this and think Michael Keaton is playing the role. This doesn’t look anything like Heath Ledger or the Joker we’ve been seeing in the previews. It looks like a dumbed down, cartoon version when, looking at the detail of that first Batman figure I showed you, there’s no reason it couldn’t look more like this:

This is a 1:6 scale figure put out by DC Direct. Of course I wouldn’t expect vinyl or cloth clothes on a regular $9-10 figure, but look at the face. He doesn’t look silly, he looks creepy, which is the mood of the film as I gather it from trailers. But there are some other good figures in the line, including a new Scarecrow and a very good Bruce Wayne ninja figure.

The Bizarre

These are figures that are really weird and probably shouldn’t have been made. The Mighty Muggs line is trying to be cute, but I think they’re just kind of disturbing.

As far as I can tell, they’re just doing Star Wars and Marvel figures for now, but if they catch on, there could be more. I think these are supposed to be funny in the same way Legos or Minimates are, but somehow I’m not getting it. They’re round, they have giant heads, and they’re huge hunks of plastic that can’t possibly be any fun to play with. If they were plush, that would be different. There are a TON of these, and they’re all a little creepy.

The one exception is Dr. Doom. For some reason, this one cracks me up. Maybe it’s the slanted mouth on his mask. Then again, I’ve always thought Dr. Doom was hillarious.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan