Worldbuilding for Tea Drinkers
When I was in sixth grade, I had to build a castle out of cardboard. I took the biggest box I could find for the walls. I cut up egg cartons and glued the pods upside down so that they would be huts for my poor peasants to huddle in. Kailee made cardboard stairs that spiraled into the upper floors of my grand castle. It was the largest castle in my class.
I got a C.
The castle is an integral part of so many fantasy stories. It is the place where ghosts trickle in through the cracks in the walls, grazing the tapestries. It is the place where ladies and knights gaze at each other across the moat. When I was a kid, I thought that the castle in my own story would look exactly like Versailles, all pomp, decadence, and fancy. It wasn’t until I was a bit older that I realized that the castle in my book is a skyscraper, a thing of modified hubris in a slightly different way than Versailles.
As I have done some maintenance on my book, I am turning increasingly to the world in which it is set. I set up my notebooks that comprise my box (I’ll do a tour of the box later), I pour tea into a teacup instead of a mug, and I sketch out the terrain, both literally and metaphorically. Ultimately, this world runs on stories, and pumping life into those stories, replacing their blood with the slick oil of a (hopefully) well-tuned plot. In essence, I am worldbuilding again.
There is no magic system in my book. There is a portal, a beast of its own personality, but the word magic doesn’t appear in the manuscript once. This was quite intentional. I want the book focused on character, atmosphere, a lush mise-en-scene. There are no chosen one narratives, but there are found families, enchanted forests, and a hell of a number of motifs.
This collection of stories goes into a series that I call Fable’s Fantasy. I need to finish these maps of the cities. Here is the thing: For so long, I have envisioned it as six loosely-linked stories. Now I am uncertain whether I want to delete an entire book and have the plot pivot around five pieces. The goal for Fable’s Fantasy is to create a large-scale contrapuntal, with each book reacting to each other in different ways. Book one is a counterpart to book five (or six).
What this is actually like is Cloud Atlas. Several of my wonderful peers in grad school stated in workshops that I ought to check into it. The wonderful Vicki bought me a copy for my birthday. Although I haven’t read it yet, I have perused its table of contents, with lapping stories and a nestled structure, like a Russian doll set. This is sort of what I have been going for myself, so I look forward to finally reading it.
Worldbuilding is most often associated with fantasy, but this is not exclusive. There are plenty of literary fiction pieces that have to establish the rules of the road before they steer themselves onto them. Because I write pretty exclusively in a speculative vein, the smaller details of worldbuilding take on a sort of act of verisimilitude to make the world feel “real” when it is so far away from our everyday experiences.
There are a thousand details that I can accumulate, all packed neatly into my box. Curating those details into the book is another thing entirely. You don’t want the reader drowning in the description of the wrought iron fence behind the character who is dying, bleeding out. It is about pushing the reader like the wind pushes the bird. I think of books almost like a flock of birds flapping as one, patrolling the skies as a single, fluid fist.
I think back sometimes on that giant castle project. I got a C because I didn’t have any people wandering its halls. In some ways, it was my first attempt at worldbuilding. I always pictured it as a special, magical castle. In that class, I also built a Styrofoam model of Rome. Toothpicks held up the Colosseum and splashes of red paint gave the entire thing a bruised, bloodied look, like history had battered it. I got an A on that one.
It is all about how you build it.
