World building for dummies (It’s me. I’m the dummy.)
As a WTMP mentor, I’ve been reading through a lot of opening pages for sci-fi and fantasy manuscripts. There’s so much raw talent at play, but it’s very clear that overloaded world building is a common problem. Unfortunately I can’t mentor everyone through this issue, but I can write this blog post. Hopefully it helps.
First, know that every speculative author goes through this learning curve at some point. This includes me.
The first manuscript I ever wrote was set in a dystopian fantasy world with a complicated superpower system, tons of new terminology, and a zillion proper nouns (not including character names). There were at least 25 terms I had to establish in the first 50 pages just to understand how the world functioned. Some of you probably already know this, but I had to rewrite this book 36 times before I struck a proper balance between comprehension and entertainment value. The amount of terminology I had to establish was the primary cause.
The award for subtlest metaphor ever goes to…
Over time, I learned to recognize two red-flag indicators in my openings for overburdened world building:
1) Reader confusion
2) Slow pacing relative to the rest of the book
Indicator #1 is self-explanatory. If multiple readers report that they don’t understand my world, then I have an overload problem. Too much is being established at once.
Indicator #2 can have different reasons, but the effect is that it reads slow. This is my personal opinion, but slow pacing = reader boredom. It’s my job as the author to determine where the boredom is stemming from. It’s usually the impulse to info dump.
Info dumping usually slips out when I introduce a term in the wrong scene choice. If the term isn’t something I can introduce organically in that scene, info dumping becomes my only choice. But because I want my world introduced as organically as possible, I will cut the info dumping passages and create a whole new scene designed to introduce that term in a way that 1) demonstrates character, and 2) has immediate stakes.
We all know that readers must understand the terminology to understand how they feed into the stakes of a given scene. Because of this, my solution can’t be “info dump and move on.” That’s not memorable. It’s like stopping the narrative to read a textbook. Why would I expect a reader to enjoy that? Info dumping is boring!
The solution is to back up and add a new, entertaining scene that is relevant to the necessary terminology.
In other words, restructure my opening.
Tragic, I know.
We get so fixated on a specific, show-off-the-world-building scene as our super powerful opening! But do we need that, really? Sword fights and explosions are some of the slowest opening scenes for a reason: No emotional stakes. The author is breaking things before we know what is breaking or why it’s important to the characters. Why not back up the novel to a more intimate, vulnerable moment for your characters, then drop them into danger? A microcosm of my character’s struggle requires way fewer terminology and enables the emotional sticking power to make that terminology memorable. Why use textbook-like info dump paragraphs when I can literally traumatize my reader into memorizing my terminology? It’s more fun for both of us that way!
Moral of this story: Each new world building term is a speed bump on the road that is your novel. It takes extra brain power for a reader to digest. Too many speed bumps will make them put the book down. Just enough will keep them at just the right pace to appreciate the scenic road.
My advice: Break your world down into bite-sized, emotionally relevant pieces. Slow down and build scenes around your terminology in the order you need to establish it. That way, when you get into the fights and explosions and super high stakes, the reader doesn’t need to pause and give themselves a vocabulary lesson just to follow along.
There’s no rush to get your entire world on the page at once.