Worldbuilding for Masochists

Episode 149: Especially the Lies: Building Unreliable Worlds, ft. MARINA LOSTETTER

What happens when the world your characters -- or your readers -- first find themselves in turns out to be not quite what it appears? Marina Lostetter joins us to explore the different ways that a writer can play with an unreliable world. Maybe it means a story of scientific discovery that reshapes how their characters perceive their place in the universe; maybe it means a story where information has been deliberately suppressed and has to be fought for; maybe it's a world where knowledge has simply been lost and must be recovered. It could even mean a world that is, itself, changing as the story goes on!

What are the challenges for on-boarding readers to an unreliable world? How is it different in a story that starts in what seems to be our modern real world and then reveals the Matrix or a portal universe versus a story that begins in a fantasy world, so that the author has to get the reader up to speed on that before they can start introducing the world's secrets? What role does self-mythologizing play at both the personal and the societal level? How about the pressure of a character maintaining a lie, either for themself, someone else, or their whole nation? Building these things may mean thinking about your world in layers of who knows what -- and how easy or difficult it is to peel back those layers.

We also wrangle with the difficulty in combining an unreliable world with an unreliable narrator. Characters lying to teach other is one thing -- but a narrative lying to the reader or viewer is a riskier choice! It can be beautiful when done well -- but it can also be a breach of trust that impairs the overall story.

[Transcript for Episode 149]

About Our Guest: The open skies and dense forests of the Pacific Northwest are ideal for growing speculative fiction authors–or, at least, Marina would like to think so. Originally from Oregon, she now resides in Arkansas with her spouse, Alex. In her spare time she enjoys globetrotting, board games, and all things art-related. Her original short fiction has appeared in venues such as Lightspeed, Uncanny, and Shimmer Magazine.  Her space opera trilogy NOUMENON and the stand-alone space adventure ACTIVATION DEGRADATION are available from Harper Voyager.  The first two books in her first dark fantasy trilogy, THE HELM OF MIDNIGHT and THE CAGE OF DARK HOURS, are out from Tor. In addition, she has written tie-in materials for Star Citizen and the Aliens franchise. She is represented by DongWon Song of the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency, and she skeets on Bluesky as @MarinaLostetter.

Episode 148: Horny on Main: Smutting Up Your Worldbuilding

In honor of Valentine's Day, the season of Carnivale, and our own amusement, we bring to you this extra-long episode, where we heat things up and get a little down and dirty with our worldbuilding. What role does sex play in the world you're building -- and how do you depict that?

This comes up a lot, obviously, in romantasy and other related subgenres, but even if that's not what you're writing, sexuality and gender dynamics are still part of whatever world your characters inhabit! So what's the dominant paradigm of sexual relations in your world? How sex-positive or puritanical are they? How queernorm? How monogamous or expansive in their ideas of relationships? What physical attributes, clothing styles, or acts do they find particularly sexy? And how accepting or judgmental are they of desires that fall outside that paradigm?

We also wrangle with the craft of how to portray these things on the page. How do you decide what amount of "on-screen" spice feels right for this particular story? How explicit do you get, and what words do you choose for that? And even in non-sexy scenes, how much word count do you spend on cluing readers in to the ways in which your world's sexual mores might not match their assumptions?

[Transcript for Episode 148]

Episode 147: Something Is A-Myth, ft. KRITIKA H. RAO

Mythological retellings have been having A Moment in fiction for a few years now. So, why do we do that? Kritika H. Rao joins us to explore the power and agency inherent in recontextualizing mythology for a modern readership! What is it that we reclaim or rediscover in retelling these stories for ourselves? And, on the other end of the scale, how can the retelling of ancient stories sometimes be weaponized and politicized for a specific purpose?

When it comes to respinning our world's mythology for a novel, authors may find themselves caught somewhere between the constraints of readers' expectations and the abundant freedom that the myths themselves may present. Myths frequently do not adhere to the supposed rules of either storytelling or worldbuilding: things happen because they happen, or because gods, and plot threads don't always resolve as we would expect them to elsewhere.

And if you're building your own pantheon and mythology for your fantasy world, how do you go about that? What kinds of things would the people in your society choose to tell stories about? What are the things they most want to explain to themselves and use as a vessel to pass along their values and traditions? Just as we examine the role of myths in our own history and society, we can apply that examination to our invented worlds as well!

[Transcript TK]

Our Guest: Kritika H. Rao is a speculative and children’s fiction author, who has lived in India, Australia, Canada, and The Sultanate of Oman. Whether writing for younger audiences or adults, Kritika’s stories are influenced by her lived experiences, and explore themes of self vs. the world, identity, and the nature of consciousness. When she is not writing, she is probably making lists. She drops in and out of social media; you might catch her on Instagram @KritikaHRao. Visit her online at www.kritikahrao.com. 

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Episode 146: A Matter of Character (ft SOPHIE BURNHAM)

The world a character exists in shapes their identity on many axes of power and privilege. So how do those various scales affect the emotional stakes of the story they find themselves in? Guest Sophie Burnham joins us to discuss building a world that suits the characters you have in your head!

As a writer who starts with character first, Burnham answers questions about their world after they know who their characters are and what dynamics drive them. If that's your style, how do you then build a world that makes sense for them to exist in -- whether they're in sync with the dominant paradigms of their world or in conflict with the systems that rule them? How do you determine things like class structure, technology levels, clothing, and more? How do the world's problems and the characters' problems intertwine and inform each other? Worldbuilding can be an excellent way to define the obstacles that face your character--and the solutions they find for them!

[Transcript TK]

Our Guest: Sophie (they/them) is the author of the Ex Romana trilogy. The first novel, Sargassa, is now available wherever books are sold.

They have been a participating writer in—and the script doctor behind—multiple studio film and television projects. They’re a recovering theatre kid with a BFA in Acting from Syracuse University. Sophie lives with their dog on an island in Rhode Island, which is not an island.

Episode 145: To Worldbuild or Not to Worldbuild, That Is the Question

And obviously the answer is yes! But in this episode, we answer your questions! We talk about the "rules" and common advice of worldbuilding -- and the ways in which we merrily ignore, redefine, or defy them. We pull apart some techniques related to the craft of communicating worldbuilding to a reader and how to achieve balance within a story. We do some shop talk about the publishing world. And we give you our very important opinions about unicorns.

We also do a little recap of 2024! From novels and novellas to getting the Traveling Light anthology out to meeting up in Scotland, we did some things! What will come in 2025? Well... Keep listening to the podcast, and you'll find out along with us!

 

[Transcript for Episode 145]

Episode 144: What Do You Do with a B.A. in Magic?

How do the people in your world learn things? Lessons learned might come from formalized institutions, but knowledge might also get passed down through families, through guilds and trade organizations, or through the wisdom whispered in a character's ear by the trees. A world's literacy rate will define a lot about how information gets transmitted, preserved, or altered over time. So who controls the access to information, and how do they enforce it?

We also poke at the perennially persistent trope of the magical school. How is magical education similar to or different from other forms of education in your society? Is it mandatory, to help control the danger that magic might present to society, or is it a privilege reserved for a very few? How about magical R&D -- How do people discover or develop new magic?

[Transcript for Episode 144]

Episode 143: Children of the Revolution

In this episode, we discuss purely fictional, 100% not-at-all real, nothing to do with contemporary life ideas about rebellions and revolutions. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, or persons is coincidental. Completely.

Continuing our "back to basics" series, and jumping off of a lot of the things we've discussed in the recent episodes on governments and politics, we think about what happens when those things break down. What conditions within the world you're building might lead to a rebellion? What sustains it? What allows it to succeed, or what will cause it to fail? How much of the righteousness of a revolution depends upon where you're standing? How does the rest of the world view the resistance -- and what shapes their ideas of it?

So we talk a lot about Star Wars. And Battlestar Galactica. And The Hunger Games.

Y'know. Fiction.

Episode 142: Law & Order (DUN DUN)

So once you've got a government, what can that government do? What does it regulate, and how is it, itself, regulated? Laws can be created for a lot of reasons, some good and some bad. Sometimes they protect a citizen's opportunity to do certain things, sometimes they present a block to those opportunities, and very often, they aren't applied equally and equitably across all of society. So when you're building a world: How does the law work? From creation to enforcement to justice (or the lack thereof), what are the mechanics, and who has the ability to access -- or manipulate -- them?

Laws also aren't the only way that a society regulates itself. Moral standards, taboos, and customs also have a sort of governing force, as well as their own systems of enforcement. How does that get entangled with the way your characters live their lives?

[Transcript for Episode 142]

Episode 141: More Perfect Unions

Government is a set of rules agreed upon, and politics is how a society determines those rules. So how do you create the systems by which civilizations negotiate those levers of power in your fantasy or sci-fi world? On the sliding scale of representation to authoritarianism, where do the civilizations in your world fall -- and why? What pressures have shaped society to behave in the ways that it does? How centralized or de-centralized is it? 

So much of this can depend on the matrix of identity: the question of who gets to participate in government. Sometimes that's the official government, and sometimes that's the back-channels and shadow governments. And -- how much sense does your government really have to make, considering the real-world examples we have to draw from? Dysfunction can be every bit as authentic as function -- and often a lot more interesting for your plot!

[Transcript for Episode 141]

 

Episode 140: Practical Magic, ft. ROWENNA MILLER

As with the last two “back to basics” episodes, we thought we’d spend some time looking the thing that (usually, though there are exceptions) makes fantasy fantastical – the magic! How do we build magical systems, and what questions do we ask ourselves while doing so? Guest and former WFM co-host Rowenna Miller joins us to discuss how, exactly, we make magic!

With magic being a foundational element of a world, when it exists in one, how does it touch all the other things that are in your world? Where does it come from (and is that the same thing as where your characters think it comes from)? Who can use it? Does that confer power -- or draw persecution? What are the limits on what magic can do -- and how might your characters push those boundaries? Magic is such a powerful force, and there are so many exciting ways to build it into your story!

(Transcript for Episode 140 -- thank you, scribes!)

Our Guest: Rowenna Miller is the author of the Unraveled Kingdom trilogy and The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill, as well as short fiction. She is also a prior cohost of this podcast! And also an English professor, and a fairly handy seamstress. She lives in Indiana with her husband, two daughters, four cats, and an ever-growing flock of chickens.