Overblown World-building?

Glenburne

Scourge of Squirreldom
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This interview with a current fantasy author (posted in another thread as well) about what his experiences growing up with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe started me thinking about world-building. Some fantasy authors spend a lot of time creating their alternative worlds--everything has to make sense. Others mainly focus on how their alternative world affects their characters, and some only care about not being obviously contradictory--e.g., in The Wind and the Willows, how exactly do the animals get their food, since none of them apparently work?

C.S. Lewis put relatively little emphasis on world-building as such in LWW. The world of Narnia became more complex in later stories, of course, but in general Lewis only described what he needed to for the story itself to make sense. He did not mind seemingly contradictory elements--e.g., throwing Father Christmas in with characters from Greek mythology, Norse mythology, and Scottish folklore.

J.R.R. Tolkien, on the other hand, couldn't stand that sort of thing. He became a pioneer of modern fantasy partly because his world-building in LotR was more detailed than any previous fantasy work. Tolkien was trying to create a unified mythology, and it showed. Later fantasy authors--who generally cared much less about mythology as such--copied Tolkien in drawing very detailed fantasy worlds. Most of today's adult fantasy shows Tolkien's influence, while some children's fantasy shows Lewis's (I'm looking at you, Philip Pullman).

The question is--who was right, Tolkien or Lewis? Or, if both writers' styles had their place, then have modern writers of epic fantasy sometimes gotten obsessive about world-building in a way that Tolkien was not? Is there a problem when people start discussing the way a fantasy world's meteorology works? or when they start trying to explain how magic would affect the energy levels in other parts of the same room?

In other words, how much is too much?
 
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Oh, I like this thread.:D

I have created several fantasy worlds with varying degrees of depth. I tend to err on the side of only explaining as much as I need to. Like, for instance, one of the countries in my books is called "Snow Country" which implies cold, but I don't bother to go into detail about HOW cold. I don't say that it was -20 on the coldest days and 50 on the warmest, I just say that it was cold. Those kinds of details tend to clutter up a story and make it hard to read (or at least these kinds of stories).

There is a world that I have been building since I was about five years old. The world itself doesn't have a name, but the main country is called "Catland". When I first made it it wasn't terribly detailed (well, maybe it was for a five-year-old) but it got the point across- what we knew of it illustrated the story and made it make sense. As I grew older I added things as the plot required them. For instance, I wanted to add a new race to my world, so I made an unexplored hill-country on one side of Catland. I wanted enough room for battles outside of my country, so I made a desert on the other side where my Catlanders and the antagonists of my world, the Doglanders, could fight.
My cousin has commented on how ridiculous it is that I have so much detail in my world now, but its because its been 13 years in the making. My Catland world isn't as detailed as say, Middle Earth, but it isn't all that far behind. Yet, despite the work I've put into it, the world makes sense and doesn't seem overly complicated. It has layers, and so do my characters, but if you find yourself in that world it will take you a while to uncover those layers.

I often use this method of building the world and then making it more complex as needed in my books as well. In my first book we have Reandalawo, Wolf Woods and Cogg's fortress. Simple enough. In the second book, the world expands massively. We learn that there is a desert, a network of tunnels, several rivers, fantastic beasts, swamps and a range of enormous snowy mountains. We also are introduced to a city that has been cut off from the world due to it being unreachable except for by a treacherous mountain pass. In the third book the world expands further by introducing Snow Country and another set of mountains were the wolves and eagles live.
I think this is the best way to create a world. I don't think that you should box yourself in by giving all the details of it at the beginning, I think you should flesh it out as you go and as you must to have the plot make sense. This way, you can surprise your readers and keep things interesting.

As for contradictory elements... sometimes they make the plot more interesting and, if you can fit them in, I say more power to you. I try to make everything make sense in my books and my Catland world, but not make sense in OUR world. I make the random elements make sense in THAT world, because if I try to make them make sense by our standards then I'd have to unravel the world that I started 13 years ago and start over. I try to think if something would make sense in that world, or if I can somehow jigsaw it around and come up with a solution to make it seem logical or at least possible.

In addition, I think that if your world-building confuses the story and throws it off course (like my earlier example of the temperatures) then you're doing it wrong. Ultimately, I think that the world should be built with the story or around it. Afterall, God wanted to create people, so he made us an Earth to live on. It made sense to the story to give us a place to BE and he created it to suit our needs. That's how I think a story and world should coexist, whether the world is extremely detailed or builds on itself or is completely random.

*stares up at post* Heh, that was a lot....
 
It's a good question! As we've discussed elsewhere, the Inklings were right in the thick of the literary transition from earlier, simpler imaginative stories such as legends and fairy tales to more comprehensive and complex worlds. Their impact is deep and lasting.

I don't know if there's a "right" or "wrong" here, just "suitable for what the author is attempting". The temptation to immerse yourself so deeply in your own world is a strong one. (After the success of The Hobbit, Tolkien wanted to plunge right into his next work - a treatise on the intricacies of Elven languages.) But on the other hand, people's tastes have changed - if they're going to step into a fantastic world, they now expect some degree of coherence and internal consistency. (Witness the fervor over J.K. Rowling's world of Harry Potter.) As an author myself, I also understand that if you're going to have followon stories, there's a desire to stay enough on top of your works that they don't contradict each other.
 
When Gene Roddenberry first created his Star Trek universe, he wrote a small-b "bible" for it, extending FAR BEYOND what viewers of the show and later the movies were likely ever to see. He made up imaginary "facts" about Starfleet organization, the cultures of alien races, the design of spacecraft, etc. These "facts" could then be kept in reserve, JUST IN CASE a later story required them. I believe that it is never harmful, and often beneficial, to do this.

You still CAN write in a simple style, even if you do have that "background encyclopedia;" but if you DON'T have it, you can end up with annoying unanswered questions, like, "Well, are there any OTHER countries in the Narnian world BESIDES Narnia, Telmar, Archenland, Ettinsmoor, Calormen, Galba, Terebinthia, and a handful of islands?"

For my Grey Eagle saga, I spent months writing stacks of notes before I wrote one chapter of an actual novel. I needed to "know" things like how how many airtight habitats were built under the surface of the planet Mercury, and what ethnic and religious groups colonized Mars.
 
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Not to the same extent as CoN. Tom Bombadil is probably related to Vainamoinen, a character from the Finnish epic The Kalevala. Tolkien loved The Kalevala--in fact, the Inklings morphed from an earlier club, led by Tolkien, that was focused on studying TK in the original language. Tolkien used other elements of TK in his mythology. Parts of the story of Turin Turambar, particularly his suicide scene with the talking sword, can be traced directly to TK.

TK isn't Germanic/Norse mythology, like most of the other sources Tolkien drew on, but maybe he accepted it because it was Scandinavian, at least. The Finns are from a different linguistic group, but geographically there are still fairly close. And Tom Bombadil doesn't stand as disparate from an Elf in the same way that a Faun would have from a Dwarf--at least to Lewis's original audience, who were used to encountering Fauns and Dwarves separately.
 
My wife Carol's roots are in Finland. She does NOT like "Lord of the Rings," but it may raise her eyebrows when I tell her about that Bombadil connection.
 
Thinking back over the article, I wonder what C.S. Lewis's stories would have been like had he written a Narnian story for adults. His sci-fi stories were on the less detailed side, but they all involved first visits to planets. If you write more than one story, especially for adults, the amount of detail has to increase.
 
For those who came on board recently and have never noticed, there IS a Narnian novel for adults, but written by your humble servant. Anyone can see it by clicking on my tiger image, which was originally given to me by a nice girl calling herself Lost Dreamer. I did a lot of speculative world-building in my story.
 
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