Glancing sideways, looking straight

This month, as you know, we’re Build-A-Booking: considering everything to do with plot and aiming to get our novel outlines in p-p-perfect shape before November.

And? For a lot of writers, there’s a log that lies across the path to a perfect plot. The name of that log is World Building.

Now yes, a large proportion of you will be thinking, “Ah,hey ho, this email doesn’t apply to me, because my book is perfectly grounded in the Real World. My dragon count is zero. There are no badass fairies having raunchy sex with were-creatures. I also have no star-fleets in battle, no wormholes in space, no complicated explanations about the gaseous mix in my atmosphere.”

But we all have to world build.

Yes, your world may operate according to normal rules of physics and technology, but you may still need to explain to the reader:

• Your character’s world of work: a hospital, a spy agency, a marketing firm, a special forces unit
• Your character’s key relationships: mother, father, brother, sister, kids, best friends
• Important bits of backstory, not just for your main character but for (say) a best friend, who will end up betraying your character in Chapter xx because of the thing that happened when she and your character were both at university.
• The central setting for your book. Even if that’s somewhere as recognisable as Manhattan, there’ll still be a lot to explain if your book involves chases through the subway system, the currency trading system on Wall Street, or how an escort agency operates from the inside.

And all authors have a tendency to think like this:

“Well, gosh, I do need to explain the intricacies of the subway system and Rosa’s betrayal in Chapter xx is going to make no sense unless I reveal the Affair of the Stolen Clock in her university days, so what I’ll do is just set my story down for a moment, while I do my spadework on those important topics. Then, when we get going again, Readers Will Rejoice, because my subway chase is cool and Rosa’s betrayal will be surprising but also kinda logical at the same time.”

So the story gets set down for a page or four. Yet, strange to say, when the author picks it up again, it’s holding many fewer readers than it was before.

That’s the World-Building Paradox, my friend. Readers buy your book because of the cool new world you offer them. They want to know about the rules of that new world (magic, or spaceships, or just subway tunnels & stolen clocks.) But if you spend time doing what the reader has pretty much asked you to do, the reader flounces off, skirts swishing in disapproval.

The solution?

The solution is just what you think it is: you don’t set down your story. But you do create the world the reader wants to inhabit.

So let’s say your character is living on a planet, where the atmosphere has large amounts of methane and can easily kill his poor little humanoid self. Here are two options for addressing that fact:

1. Long essay on origin, chemical structure and medical effects of methane, followed by story.
2. Your character really wants to itch his nose, but can’t do so without removing his helmet.

It’s pretty obvious that the second option is the way to go. You will talk less about methane that way, but you’ll tell the reader what they need and want to know. And if the reader cares about your character, then, weirdly enough, they also care about that itchy nose. The fact that the character has a thwarted want, no matter how tiny, is enough to motivate the reader.

So: lead with character – that’s rule #1. (And by the way, that’s why this email is called ‘Glancing sideways, looking straight’. You focus always on character – that’s the straight ahead bit, the narrow path of story proper. But as you’re ploughing forwards, you can glance to the side now and again. That’s the world-building essential to your task – but you never drop the forward motion.)

Rule #2 chases along right behind the first, and it’s this: do less than you think is necessary. The reader won’t care.”

Sometimes the info-dumping can be brief in the extreme. For example, in one of my books, there was an important sequence involving a south Wales cave. I didn’t want readers to feel that I was just springing something on them unannounced – that feels a bit cheaty. Nor could I just assume that readers just knew enough about the geology of Wales to know there were caves. So, many chapters earlier, I had a secondary character say, ‘Those monks. The ones with a brewing licence. They’re up in the Beacons somewhere. Up the valley from that caving place.’

That’s it. Caving established. World built enough for now.

Do you want one more rule? Or maybe just a teeny-weeny guideline? OK:

Rule #3, that’s maybe more of a Guideline: “Deliver information after the reader cries out for it.”

So take that caving issue again. Fiona (who has already figured things out) locates the entrance to a previously unknown cave system. That cave system probably holds the answer to a missing persons case from years before. Fiona has already clocked that, too. Finally, she shows the cave entrance to her superior officer. They sit on a rock and chat:

[Fiona says,] ‘The main cave there is called Dan-yr-Ogof. You want to guess how far it extends underground?’

Burnett shakes his head. ‘I expect you’re about to tell me.’

‘Seventeen kilometres. Eleven miles. One of the main explorers of that system reckons the whole thing will run ninety miles once it’s fully mapped.’

‘You’re saying this . . .  this . . . tunnel here connects with Dan-yr-Ogof?’

I shake my head. ‘Maybe, I’ve no idea. But this whole area is hollow with caves. Ogof Draenen measures seventy undergound kilometres. Ogof Ffynnon Ddu runs to almost sixty. Agen Allwedd runs to over thirty. And there are dozens more as well, a whole sweep of them. The whole southern edge of the Brecon Beacons and Black Mountains. The chain runs all the way to Abergavenny. Fifty or sixty caves easily and that’s only the ones we know about.’

Burnett joins me on the scree. Says, ‘Fuck.’

Says, ‘Times like this, I’d kill for a cigarette.’

I tell him he doesn’t have to kill anyone. Also—and this is really Murder Planning 1.01—he shouldn’t announce his intentions beforehand, particularly to a detective sergeant whose specialism is in major crime.

All this information is delivered after they’ve found the cave, after Burnett orders Fiona to explore the first few yards of it, after she’s crawled into the tunnel, banged her head and been shocked by the deep darkness of this new world.

The information is also delivered after Fiona has connected the cave’s existence to the missing persons case. So we’ve had some real action, a real (physical, visceral) entrance into this new world, and a sense that this place is strongly connected to a core story thread in the book.

By this point, the reader is totally sold. “Yes, jeepers, caves are important! I want to know more about caves, I can see they’re going to play a huge role in what follows.” So then Fiona tells the reader, in effect, “There are lots of caves in south Wales and some of them are really, really big.”

That settles the reader for now. It gives a sense of the scale of what might lie ahead – and also confirms that the author isn’t tricking. Caves are a perfectly legitimate element in a mystery story set in that particular part of the world.

Notice that there’s still a lot that I haven’t said. What does a cave look like inside? How are they formed? Can you get large bodies of water inside a cave? All that will matter a bit further on into the story, but those bits of information are delivered later, when they’re needed.

And that’s it.

Log cleared.

Lead with character. Do less than you think is necessary. Bring information to the reader only once the reader is thirsting for it.

That’s true for books about Manhattan or Welsh caves or busy hospitals. It’s also true for books about raunchy fairies, star-fleet battles or grumpy dragons.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Info Dumps

OK, I want you to find a place in your book where you have an info dump – much like my material on caving above. My extract above was about 200 words, but only about 150 words had to do with caves, rather than murder planning. So look for an extract of about 200-250 words, but also give us plenty of context that introduces your passage. In that little caving scene, it really mattered that the info came after Fiona had physically been inside the cave (albeit only a very short way.) So give us enough to understand how the information you’re giving us connects to the broader story.

You got that? You got it. Ready – GO. Log in and share your work on Townhouse when you’re ready.

Til soon.

Harry