The Shoulders of Giants

Last week I talked about little about how I use travel to worldbuild. Specially I mentioned how I write travel diaries and guides from within the world to build the world. This is ultimately how I build history which I think a good number of people get very wrong.

To start out there are the two problems of: longer must be better and details must be better. To highlight this; how many fantasy stories open with “Ten thousand years ago the evil was sealed. Today it lies forgotten…”, or have ancient peoples with more interesting lives than the ones ‘today’. This shows me that the worldbuilder doesn't understand history or how to use it.

To start let us take a look at the length of history. I see history like looking into a column of water. In this case the current day is the surface, and much like geology the older the deeper. Thus when a worldbuilder starts with “ten thousand years ago…” there is a massive column of water with some really good lighting; or, a shallow column of water being passed off as a large one. I test this with a “consistency test”.

There is a quote out there:

Some years, centuries pass. Some centuries years pass. Thus is the ebb and flow of history.

Now I can't find a good source for the quote. It is often used to justify gaps in historical events. Generally within the thought lines, “I need there to be more time between A and B” and “This guy is going to do everything!” This makes the world's history turn into a rather thin, chunky, soup. There are pockets of events and characters within the history. Yet the stuff connecting it is so thin and vapid it might as well not exist. This very lumpy consistency is what often highlights a bad history for a world. Yet this kind of consistency doesn't mandate a bad historical footing. If the chunks are smaller and the soup is thick and flavorful than it highlights a well used history.

A well used history will be consistently inconsistent. Things will be missing, overlooked, or held in secret. Not everyone will know everything. Yet as a worldbuilder we need to know everything, or at least enough to keep there from being too many glaring errors.

Yet that mindset can lead to another issue; compression. This is where a worldbuilder dials in the “Last Thursday” setting and haves at it. For those unaware of the Last Thursday assertion it is the following:

It is philosophically impossible to determine if the universe wasn't created last Thursday and simply was created to look like it was billions of years old.

The difference is that when worldbuilders tend to do it, everyone knows it was built last Thursday. This often rears it's head by everyone knowing everything. Historians and laymen alike know everything. Who did what, where and how they did it, likely even knowing what was worn. Generally history is short, maybe in the dozens of decades at most. Here history is an hors d’oeuvres patter. With singular bites of interesting things with nothing really substantial enough to satisfy. To prevent both of these I would suggest wading into history. Which is functionally doing what I suggested doing with the travel diaries last week but expanded.

To recount here is the relevant section from last week.

This often means I develop a viewpoint character and treat it like a mini-story. Not always the most riveting story, as it's a record of a character exploring a place. Yet it works to set the stage for when proper stories follow in their path.

…

By doing this I put the story to history. Thus instead of having histories that are lists of events but rather stories of people and their places. Which is what one could use as the philosophical basis for culture.

The philosophical basis comes from the argument that culture is the collection of stories that a group of people tell about themselves to themselves. In essence it is how they view their history. With things such as stories of the good and the bad, the humorous and the tragic, the inspiring and the warnings. For most worldbuilders they talk about how this is too much to do, story tellers question why one would write background stories. In short it is the second bird to history with the stone. By writing the history as a collection of stories culture can be derived and better characters, better places, and better the story.

I do this by starting out with the oldest and simplest stories. Often writing them like I am in early school, if not pre-school. Simple, crude language, and rather short tales. These are meant to be the old tails, the things which could survive hundreds or thousands of years. The kind of story that could become myth and legends. Yes one could write Iliad or Odyssey for their worlds as a background text. However largely this isn’t necessary, even if it is good fun. As time rolls forward rewrite, adapt, and evolve the stories as it get’s closer to today. With the number of stories going down as the world count, and complexity, goes up. By building up history this way there are stories in the history. Those stories become the culture and the culture develops the characters.

While writing stories one cannot ignore factual events. There is a use for the dry factual, perhaps from an omnipotent viewpoint, record of history. It provides the ‘source’ to fill out the stories. I would keep these higher level, and fill out the details with the stories. If there was a civil war after the death of a king, I’d have a timeline of who did what when. How things played out from that factual view point. Let the characters make their cases in the stories.

Once these two things are in place it is easy to develop more cultures as well. A while ago, during one of the earlier forms of Worldbuild Wednesday, I mentioned I evolve cultures much like a conlanger (one who builds languages) evolve their languages from a root. This is how I accomplish that. I find a point in the history and I change the viewpoint on that event. The glorious victory is a shameful one. The king who cleaned up crime was a tyrant. So on and so forth. By changing or adding a viewpoint on these topics I can evolve another culture. The further back I go, the more divergent it I can make it. Much like a branching path, the farther from the split the more different the path can be.

I do feel obliged to point out that when developing history and culture this way you are creating the ‘average’. This means that any characters within the culture can be different, if not an outlier entirely. Within a culture there will be various flavors, counter cultures and whatever else one may need.

With that I’ll be back next week.

Last week’s installment should you have missed it.

Where are you going?

I am currently on vacation. However the worldbuilding must flow. So this week I’m going to be talking about traveling. There are a few ways to include travel into a world, and how travel in the world should change. Yet I think the more interesting angle is to use travel to build your world.

Grathew’s GazetteGrathew