A combination of things – among them unreliable Internet access – has prevented me from updating much recently. I’m not sure I can still in good conscience call this a “weekly” blog. But I’m back! I have sent a few agent queries out for Rabbit and Cougar, and plan to send more this week. In the meantime, I have something else to talk about.

Recently, a friend and I were talking about worldbuilding, and then the other day we went to Bath. These things are related because I find Bath to be a good visual metaphor of one thing we’d been discussing: keeping a consistent feel in the world you’ve created. Bath feels like a world of its own because of the Bath sandstone. For anyone who’s never been there, the whole city is a historical site, and virtually every building is at least paneled in sandstone of the same color. It’s as if the whole city were carved out of one big rock, or all splashed by the same (pale yellowish) paint. This is despite its having Burger Kings and Indian restaurants packed in with art galleries, modern and classical, tourist shops, the Baths once frequented by Romans and the Assembly Rooms visited by Jane Austen.

Naturally, any well-crafted fictional culture – or even any single city – is likely to have diverse populations and institutions and remnants of various historical periods. This can add richness, but the culture does need to be drawn together by common elements or risk seeming random and poorly-conceived. If, for example, a fantasy world contains characters named Aletha and Hedric and also characters named Terry and Doug, supposedly from the same place and with similar backgrounds, the world will seem inconsistent. (This is worse when half of the characters in one culture have generic old British names such as Will and half have names the author made up that are filled with Xs and cannot be pronounced without years of training and possibly a second tongue. Do not speak to me about apostrophes.)

This is a funny problem because, as often happens when fiction imitates real life, the fiction must make sense in a way that reality sometimes doesn’t. Obviously, most people do not have to be convinced that something could work in an unlikely way if they actually see it working that way. A real-life culture that seems to lack coherence is not seen as “unrealistic.” Still, that doesn’t mean you can get away with it in your worldbuilding.

So, how to do this? A lot of generic medievalesque fantasy writers do it without much difficulty simply by basing their worlds on Britain at a certain time period. There’s nothing wrong with that, assuming the story, characters, and writing are good. One of the continents in my fantasy world was created basically that way. Things can be more difficult when basing a culture on another real-life country just because it’s done less, so people are less sure how to take it. You don’t want to create a race or civilization that seems like an offensive stereotype of a real people – think of some of the criticisms of certain Star Wars aliens.

Naturally, you want to do as much creation as possible going forwards rather than backwards – that is, thinking, “What would logically proceed from this?” rather than, “How can I make this thing happen?” You can certainly work with the latter if you have one or a few important traits you want in your culture and are flexible on the rest. For example, if you want to write a fantasy plot that involves a lot of sea travel, then you must create at least one civilization that possesses ocean-going ships or other means of transport. This is not a problem. If, say, you’re also determined that this civilization lack a technology common to the rest of your world, then you have to account for why travelers and traders using their port have not introduced this technology. Things become more complicated. If you put too many demands on a civilization before you create it, you can build yourself into a corner. If, on the other hand, you simply start with what the people would have had (say, a coastal area at the mouth of a river in a warm climate, with rich soil), then you can make your culture from there in a way that makes sense. Depending on how you do it, this can mean a lot of research, but you can borrow from existent (or historic) cultures that shared similar features – your civilization might do things in a different style, but is likely to develop similar kinds of technology, practical clothing, and so on. You do have to be careful that you don’t borrow something that in reality was caused by a factor your world doesn’t have: Religion will trip you up here, because it is behind so many traditions and may not be the same as the beliefs in your world. You also have to keep in mind things that your world has and reality doesn’t that could have affected the culture’s development. If there is magic, for example, or if multiple intelligent species coexist, that should be accounted for.

If you’re not writing fantasy or science fiction, you may have an easier time because a civilization more similar to reality will have more things you can just assume. If you are writing fantasy or sci-fi, here are a few things you might consider to keep each culture you write consistent.

1. Names. This does not have to be a pitfall – it can be an opportunity. Names can be a great way to establish differences between cultures – you just want to be consistent within each culture. One way to do this is to adapt (or blatantly steal) names from different languages. It’s a silly example, but if you have characters named Marcus and Furianus who meet someone named Elizabeth, the names will draw a stark cultural line between the two groups. Obviously, a fantasy world could be a place where a civilization exists that encompasses both names, but it would be hard to do something like this well. Similarly, if you make up all of your names, try to make them sound consistent – you might want to think a little about the sounds of the languages your people speak.

2. Dress. What is the climate of this civilization like? What are common occupations? What materials and dyes are available? Do certain colors have religious or societal significance? Maybe only mages wear red, only royalty wear white, or purple is worn only in mourning. Remember also that people in different places may come up with different ways to solve the same problem due to their varying resources and beliefs.

3. Speech. If you have a character who is not speaking his/her first language, how might that affect word choice and order? Even if everyone speaks the same language well enough for it not to matter, some people may have traditions of speech – being more formal, for example. Consider also things that go along with speech: accents, hand movements, and possibly other gestures such as bowing.

4. Supernatural Elements. If your world has magic, it may not be the same kind all over. Even if it is, it may not be regarded the same way everywhere. Like technology, certain kinds of magic may be more advanced in places where they are more practical: Agricultural magic in a farming area, for example. Magical creatures, too, may be approached differently by different societies. Maybe one culture reveres dragons, another hates and fears them, and another has never heard of them.

You can add to the coherence of your fantasy civilization through many other elements – architecture, manners, traditions, beliefs – but the above are ones that seem especially likely to come up and may involve less research than some others. Not everyone wants to think about things like architecture. Consistency is important even if only one culture appears in your story, and it is sometimes easy to slip. Still, it can be very rewarding to build a culture in detail, and it may lead to more story ideas!

This week, I’d like to talk about world-building. I’ve done quite a bit of it this week in addition to, and in conjunction with, editing Rabbit and Cougar. It’s a big topic in fantasy writing, so I won’t tackle everything, but here are a few points.

Fantasy worldbuilding is about much more than the fantastical. To make a world real, you must consider logic. Consider it early and often. Any fantastical assumptions you make must be followed by the proper logical progressions. This is a major factor with things like magic, especially because it can be difficult to think of everything that might follow a certain development, but it is also important to the economy, politics, social relations (including those between different intelligent species, if your world has more than one), and even ecology of your fantasy world.

This applies to non-fantasy as well. Let’s say you’re writing a non-fantasy book (for some reason ;P) set in Virginia, and you decide to make up a town because you don’t want to deal with making mistakes about real places or getting sued by anyone. If setting is going to be any non-negligible part of your story, you need to have some idea of the reason your town exists and how it works: What are major employers? Is it a college town? A farming area? Historical site? What is there to do? If you want your setting to be a city of 80,000 people, then make sure they have a reason to be there. Conversely, if your town has a population of 5,000, you may not want to give it a major shopping center or university. Make your setting make sense.

Medievalesque fantasy, my main writing area, has some special challenges. In a town, city, or other settlement: What is the main water source? People will not usually settle in a place without readily available drinking water – unless you have designed a species that doesn’t need it. Where do the inhabitants get food, and what kind? Clothes? What do they do for entertainment? With whom do they trade, and for what? I recently had issues when I realized that a character owned a frying pan whose society had virtually no way to obtain metal. That had to be reworked, and my understanding of the character’s society deepened as I actually decided how they would use other materials in situations when we might use metal. Indeed, it led to a convenient plot point.

Ecology, too, can be a real issue in fantasy. Many fantasy writers seem tempted to throw a whole bunch of apex predators into a world which otherwise, it seems, contains mostly the same animals we have on Earth. What, one wonders, do their dragons eat? And sphinxes, leviathans, chimeras (chimerae?), basilisks, and so on? Do any of them compete with predators we would recognize? (I once saw a program in which a dragon and a tiger fought out a territorial dispute.) How many of these creatures – and the answer is often “all of them” – eat people? Can they survive on people alone, or do they also eat livestock and large wild animals (buffalo, deer, whales, or things that in this world are top-tier predators, such as bears).

(As an interesting point, it seems that humans reached their current evolutionary stage on Earth starting as prey animals. With our intelligence and tool-making abilities, we turned the tables on our predators, many of which are now endangered. Keep in mind, if your fantasy world lasts for vast periods of time – say, several generations of long-lived dragons or elves – that humans will have had all this time to find ways to defeat, or at least deflect, their predators. They may even have magic in addition to tools, depending on your world.)

In my worldbuilding this week, I found a wonderful ally in a humble little book called The Audubon Society Nature Guide to Eastern Forests. I was, at the time, trying to get a feel for what it would be like to tramp through an oak forest; we have none in my immediate area, and my characters were walking around in one. It outlined different types of forests, explaining where each was found and why: the environmental factors, from temperature to soil content, that caused certain plants to grow, and how those plants plus weather, altitude, etc. affected the animals living there. I discovered that what I really wanted was an oak-hickory forest, and was immediately furnished with a long list of species found there.

The point I mean to make here is that ecology, like all of the various worldbuilding factors, can be done right or wrong even when no fantastical elements are involved. If you have a vast tundra with no wildlife except for the occasional snowshoe hare and large packs of wolves, then you have apparently invented wolves which feed on snow. As such, they should be little danger to travelers. And in a fantasy world, if you provide no reason why a thing should be different from our world, people assume it is not. (Think of gravity: unless you say otherwise, readers will assume that your characters walk on the ground and that dropped objects fall down.) This means that there are aspects of the world where you can make mistakes based on non-fantasy things. (This is common with horses. I have read many commentaries on the lack of realism associated with horses in some medievalesque fantasy. Do not let this happen to you.) Even in a world with magic, snakes cannot wink unless you expressly provide a reason why your world’s snakes have eyelids when Earth’s do not. This is a reason to research anything “real” that you plan to include and with which you are not already quite familiar – even if only very few readers, those who are experts in the area, catch an error, wouldn’t you rather not have that error? Besides, sometimes you come up with fun new facts, some of which you might use. I researched foxes over the past few days because a fox figures prominently in Rabbit and Cougar. I learned that foxes wag their tails when happy and that their “happy sounds” include clucks, whines, and what sound like human screams. I even read – though I need to check this – that they lack the facial muscles to bare their teeth. How interesting is that?

(Well, a lot, if you’re writing about a fox.)

Even if you don’t include everything – and please, don’t include everything – that you know, it’s usually better to know more. For example, the fact that my oak-hickory forest even has foxes implies that it has things they can eat – and I know what they are. That the forest contains mice, rabbits, insects, and berries (and oh yes, I do have specific species) may not come up, but knowing this will keep me from being inconsistent (for example, having the character who lives in this forest see a mouse and say “whoah, what’s that?”).

Research and good world-building makes the writing easier and more satisfying. It gives the story a deeper and more thought-out feel and allows you to confidently and correctly use specific examples. (I now know, for instance, what undergrowth grows in oak-hickory forests.) Your readers will appreciate it. And it’s loads of fun – win-win!