Holly Lisle’s

Create A World Clinic

HOLLY LISLE

WORLDBUILDING III

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Holly Lisle's Create A World Clinic

BUILDING WORLDS

CHAPTER 1--World #1: The Dot World

CHAPTER 2--Introduction

CHAPTER 3--How To Use This Book

CHAPTER 4--The Three Building Blocks of Worldbuilding

CHAPTER 5--The WHY of the Dot World

CHAPTER 6--World #2: The Line World

CHAPTER 7--The WHY of the Line World

CHAPTER 8--World #3: The Tube of Toothpaste World

CHAPTER 9--A Rant: Different to Be Different

BUILDING UNIVERSES

CHAPTER 10--What's A Fiction Universe?

CHAPTER 11--Container Universes

CHAPTER 12--Knowable Universes

CHAPTER 13--Infinite Universes

BUILDING GEEK DEEP

CHAPTER 14--Delve In The Geek Deeps

CHAPTER 15--The Dotty Triangle and the Necessary Questions

CHAPTER 16--Designing Story-Filled Maps

THE GEEK-DEEP DEMOS

GEEK-DEEP DEMO 1--List-Mapping An Ecosystem

GEEK-DEEP DEMO 2--List-Mapping Rules of Limitation

GEEK-DEEP DEMO 3--List-Mapping an Alternate Cultural View of Human Gender

BONUS: Write Your Sample Story

Conclusion

About the Author

More Books by the Author

Copyright & Dedication

Worksheet Download Link

How To Get All the Goodies If You Bought the Course Somewhere Else

BUILDING WORLDS

CHAPTER 1

World #1: The Dot World

Build Your First Complete World In Five Minutes

I’m going to hold off on the introduction for a few minutes, in favor of trying something different.

I’m going to walk you through building your first world right now. So grab a pen and a piece of paper. A napkin will do just fine if it’s all that’s available, or lined paper from a notebook, or the back of a page of the stack of email printouts sitting on your desk. Or that memo from your boss…

Whatever. If it’ll hold ink and you’ll be able to read what you’ve written once you’re done, it’ll do.

You’re going to build a small world, but big enough to give you what you need for a story. And by the time we’re done with this first exercise, you’ll already have a start for your story, too.

Here’s how this works. All the ways through this course, I’ll take the course right along with you as I write it. When I build an exercise, I’ll actually do the exercise so you can see some of the possibilities—but this will work much better for you if you don’t see my answers first.

So to make sure you get work that is purely your own, you complete each exercise before you read what I wrote.

Only when you’ve finished the exercise, move on to the next page, and take a look at what I got.

Ready?

Let’s build a world.

The Exercise

With your pen and paper at the ready, I want to you imagine that you are standing in a dark room. It’s small, and it has a ceiling, a floor, and four walls, but you can’t see them yet, because it’s absolutely dark. Don’t worry. The light will go on in a second.

But before it does, the room has one other thing in it, not including you. When the light goes on you’re going to see it…but odds are pretty good that a word or an image just popped into your head suggesting what the thing in the room with you is—so if it did, USE that.

It doesn’t matter how silly you think it is. It doesn’t matter if you can’t imagine how that word or image could matter. Or how you could get a story from it.

All that matters is that this time, you use the very first answer you get.

Okay. Now the light goes on, and you see the thing in the room with you.

Your Turn

Write down what it is.

What I Got

My answer is: The paint on the wall.

What this means is that my Muse, also known as my subconscious mind, or right brain, has decided to be a smartass. Don’t know if you have a good working relationship with your Muse yet or not, but my relationship with mine is…interesting.

And because sooner or later, most folks who rely on creativity to put food on the table develop equally interesting relationships with their Muses, I’m going to detour for just a second here. This matters, and I guess this is as good a place as any to discuss the bare bones of it.

Your left brain is your editor, the driver of your body when everything is calm and no tigers have just started growling behind you, your internal grown-up. Your right brain is a perpetual kid, one who believes everything it sees and hears, one who loves to play, one who balks when commanded to work. (It’s also the part of you that will get your feet running and have you up in the top of a tree before you can think about it if those tigers do start growling—so it has many uses.) But if you want to build a career as a writer, you have to learn how to deal with both halves of your mind. And telling your right brain—your Muse—that the idea it just gave you is stupid is a real fine way to make sure that part of your mind goes off in a corner and doesn’t give you any more ideas for a good long time. (This is how writer's block is born, incidentally.)

Your You/left brain/conscious mind is smart and articulate and organized, but it is not creative. So if you tick off your Muse and give it an excuse to shut down and quit playing your game, you are going to have a bad writing day. Or week. Or year.

Having been dealing with my particularly cantankerous Muse/right brain/subconscious mind while having to be creative on deadline for the last twenty-five years, I have learned the importance of using the ideas it gives me, no matter how weird or unworkable they seem initially, and then working to make sense of them.

EVEN, and this is important, when I suspect the idea was intended to make things difficult for me.

The paint on the wall.

Ha. Ha. Very funny. My muse could have told me, window with bars on it, or ancient door, or even dead body, and I would have had an easy time of this. But it didn’t, so now you get to see what to do when your Muse decides to get cute. And because it’s good practice, no matter what answer your Muse gave you, you’re going follow the same steps I do this time.

I have to dig deeper. I need to ask a follow up question, and I need to ask it in a certain way. It cannot be a question that can be answered with a yes, no, or maybe, as with the question, “Is there anything unusual about the paint on the wall?”

My subconscious mind just rolls its metaphorical eyes at that one and says, “Maybe.”

This is not helpful, but your subconscious mind won’t do things just to be helpful. It likes to play, and the only person it has to play with is you.

So you have to learn to ask questions that can only be answered in a useful fashion.

This is my follow-up question:

“What is unusual about the paint on the wall?”

Your Turn

Before I write down the answer to that (though my Muse just told me the answer, and it is, in fact, pretty interesting), you need to ask a follow-up question.

Here are some variants that will work:

- Why does this___________ in the room matter?

- How did this ____________ get here?

- What is unusual about this __________?

- Who (or what) is this, and how did he/she/or it get here?

- When did this ___________ appear, and under what circumstances?

- Where did this ___________ come from? (Or where does this ___________ go?)

- Why is this ____________here?

Just answer one of the questions above (or one of your own devising related to your specific situation). However, answer it at whatever length you need. Your objective is to give yourself the information that will allow you to understand what you’re dealing with. So when you have answered the question you’ve chosen, write out—then answer—any follow-up questions you need to ask. Don’t turn to the next page until you’re sure you got the full answer.

What I Got

So here’s my question again: “What is unusual about the paint on the wall?”

And because of the way I work with my right brain, I’m going write out the answers I just got in the form of a conversation. Yes, I do know this is bizarre, and you are not the first person to raise an eyebrow and suggest that I might want to seek care, counseling, or perhaps a nice padded room.

I do this because it works, because it lets me develop good story ideas quickly, and because I actually hold these conversations inside my head, though my right brain answers in images (and other sensory data) more often than it answers in words.

I just don’t usually do this in public.

Onward.

Holly: What is so unusual about the paint on the wall?

Muse: It’s black, and it’s high gloss.

Holly: Okay…why does that matter?

Muse: Because it hides the blood.

H: (thinking carefully to avoid potential booby traps) What about Luminol, which makes blood on surfaces show up?

M: Not an issue here.

H: Why is it not an issue?

M: Because Luminol doesn’t exist yet.

H: So I’m in the past?

M: (No answer. My Muse does not answer stupid questions, and that was one.)

H: (trying again) Well, the black paint suggests intent to me—that the room is going to be seen by people, that the person who painted it needs to have them not know about the blood, and that the room serves two purposes—people go into it voluntarily, but maybe people die there, too. So who owns the room?

M: An artist. (I get a flurry of images here, so what follows is the flow what runs through my mind.) Blood on the walls, part of the process, passion and imbuing each painting with a different soul, love and murder at the same time, blood in the paint, a lot of dead women, a lot of live men who buy the paintings in this room, the room where they’re hung, and the artist working on painting after painting in quick succession, and then not working at all until all but the most perfect paintings, which he keeps for himself, are sold.

And at that point, I have the jump-off point for a story.

If I need to, I can build more details into the room before I start writing, or I can ask more questions about the artist, or the women, or the buyers.

But I can write the whole story in one room, in a handful of scenes, and I already have the critical key to this world.

Glossy black paint.

This is what worldbuilding is, and this is why you do it.

Worldbuilding has nothing to do with putting a map in the front of your novel.

It has everything to do with:

- Getting good questions that help you come up with story ideas.

- Getting good answers that help you tell your story.

- Finding the fixes for broken projects—you know, all those 30-page novel starts you did that never went anywhere, and you don’t know why…

- But mostly, worldbuilding is what brings your story to life for your readers.

- And…

CHAPTER 2

Introduction

...I’m betting this wasn’t what you expected worldbuilding to be.

Most writers are certain that building worlds for their fiction is all about drawing Tolkien-esque maps to go in the fronts of their books, and creating five different cultures and ten different languages and fifteen different intelligent non-human races and at least one magic system or ultra-high-tech science system to go in their worlds.

Were YOU?

There is a point way down at the far end of worldbuilding where, if you need to, you can do all of that, and at the far end of this book, I’ll show you how. (At least the parts of this I haven’t already demonstrated in Create A Language Clinic: Worldbuilding I, and Create A Culture Clinic: Worldbuilding II.)

But odds are you are not going to need that much world for the book—or even series—you’re writing or want to write.

And maps, languages, cultures, and massive historical backgrounds are not the point of worldbuilding.

The point of worldbuilding is to set your story in a Here and a Now that feels real to your reader, and allows him to suspend disbelief so he can live in your world.

So what IS worldbuilding?

Worldbuilding is the creation of a setting or settings that will contain a story, plus the essential elements needed to tell the story well.

That’s it.

And for the purposes of writing fiction, here’s the definition of a world.

A fictional world is the setting or settings that contain a single story, and the essential elements the writer uses to tell it.

You’ll note that the word world appears nowhere in the body of the definition. You do not have to build a world to worldbuild. You build bits.

And the SANE process of worldbuilding is to do only the work you absolutely MUST have, and to do it only when you need it.

Notice the heavy emphasis on SANE?

That’s because there is another way. A dark path. And before we can get to the sunshine and the light of SANE worldbuilding again, you need to understand the dangers of this dark path.

Introducing the Error: Writing Fiction vs. Worldbuilding

Hi. My name is Holly, and I’m a worldbuilding junkie.

<A room full of fellow addicts responds> Hi, Holly.

I got to a point in my addiction where I was doing a map, a culture, and a language just to get myself going every day. Couldn’t write a word until I’d drawn some lines and labeled them, or designed a culturally relevant costume or a new and conflict-ridden religion. Where I couldn’t start a book until all my characters had hometowns, and all the hometowns had maps, and all the maps had streets, and all the streets had names and individual buildings—and every building on every street in every town and city was numbered.

Amen.

My worldbuilding had more pages than my novels, and the print was smaller.

Amen!

I wrote the history, the science, the magic, the physics, the flora, the fauna, the races, the politics, the religions, the family structures, the cultural myths and core tenets—I was determined to build a whole planet or solar system or galaxy for every book I wrote.

We hear you.

And I’d use maybe a page or two from all that worldbuilding in the actual book, and come up with new, better stuff as I was writing that conflicted with the world material I’d built, and I felt guilty about using the better material because I’d already done all that work.

I thought I needed it. I thought I had to have it, that my massive, detailed worldbuilding process was the reason I was published.

When I got off of the worldbuilding, I was clean for three years, and then I walked into an Office-Awesome last night, and ended up in the Pens Aisle, and found a complete set of 36 fine-line markers 50% off, and 12”x18” parchment packs on clearance...

...And I bought them, and went home, and drew three full-color maps, including one with weather patterns, and...

<Here I find myself talking to an empty room, because my audience of fellow recovering addicts has run for the door, all of them on their way to Office-Awesome to hit the Pens aisle before the sale ends...

...And another meeting of Worldbuilders Anonymous goes down in flames. Or up in smoke. Or any of twenty other culturally relevant clichés...and I could list them, and trace them back to their diverse linguistic and ethnic origins for you if you’d like...>

✄ ✄ ✄

The problem here is that the process I describe above is (with a tiny allowance for hyperbole) true.

For years, I was utterly convinced that massive, comprehensive, complete, all-done-in-advance-of-writing Tolkien-style worldbuilding was the only way I’d managed to get published in the first place, and that it was the step in the process that allowed me to write books. That I had to have it.

I told people this, too. There I was, with my thumb in my mouth and my security blanket over my head, saying, “My security blanket is why I sold the Arhel series and the Secret Texts series and the World Gates series, and all the stand-alones in between.”

It wasn’t the stories. Couldn’t have been that. And my massive overkill done-in-advance worldbuilding couldn’t be the thing I was succeeding in spite of.

I was dead certain my editors bought my work because of the reams of indigestible charts, graphs, outlines, maps, tables and so on that damn near killed every one of the editors I sent them to.

Of course they did.

You can mistake the thing that’s killing your writing for the thing that’s making it work.

And make no mistake: My worldbuilding was killing my writing. I’m a really fast worldbuilder, but even at high speed and working long hours, I’d spend months building everything I thought I needed before I put together a synopsis to send to my agent—who would then shoot me down, and rather than just fix the story, I’d fix the world first, and then fix the story.

And then do it again.

If you want to find the truth about what really works for you, as opposed to what you think works for you—in this case, my error of Writing Fiction vs. Worldbuilding (and this works for anything, not just digging yourself out of a worldbuilding hole)—you look for the contradiction.

When you find a contradiction between what you know—and can prove with physical evidence—is true, and what you believe is true, then you have proof that what you believe is wrong.

Here’s how it worked for me.

I knew my books were selling, so I could prove that I was writing salable fiction. That was my point of known truth.

I believed my work sold because of all the worldbuilding I did before I started writing.

But one day, I tripped over the contradiction, and it was this: I absolutely never used all or even most of the worldbuilding I did, and much more than half of my work from any pre-novel worldbuilding orgy ended up unusable because of the better ideas I had while I was writing. Sometimes, all of that pre-novel worldbuilding went down the tubes. Once. Even twice, if I rebuilt and got shot down again.

Therefore, my Tolkien-style completist worldbuilding was not what sold my books.

It took me a while to admit what I’d discovered was true. Because if my worldbuilding wasn’t the magical key to my success as a novelist, I didn’t know my own secret to selling my fiction.

And this, my friend, was a big, hairy deal. If you’re feeding your family by writing fiction, you’d better be sure you know how you do what you do, and why it works.

I ended up ignoring all the worldbuilding I’d done for the first two proposals for a series I’d pitched as Storm Sisters.

I did a new map, and kept a couple tenuously linked ideas from the two failed proposals in the back of my head...but I stopped there. I was exhausted, we were in dire financial straits, and I needed to have a finished proposal I could send to my agent.

So I plotted the book from questions I generated from the map. I did other worldbuilding by asking questions for clarification, but only as I needed to know, and only as much as I needed to know to keep writing.

I still got to do some maps, still got to do a little language-building, still got to come up with some cultural details, some neat species, some other goodies.

But I did each of these things as I went, and as a result, none of my worldbuilding was wasted, I got to start writing as soon as I’d worked out the idea and a basic plot outline, and readers had the same sense of the full world existing outside the borders of the story as they’d gotten when I was building the whole world first.

Only without me beating myself to a pulp doing it.

That first book became Talyn, followed by Hawkspar, and with them the reality sank in. It wasn’t just that building the world as I went was as good.

Building the world as I went was better.

There are reasons to build whole worlds before you do anything with them.

One is that you like to do it. That it’s your hobby. That it’s a lot of fun to develop a planet, and ecosystems, and political and social structures, and languages, and all the rest.

Another one is that it’s your job. A professor with whom I once spent a delightful afternoon co-presenting a worldbuilding workshop, Sheridan Simon (sadly, now deceased: http://www.37days.com/2005/04/know_the_point_.html ), built worlds on the side and sold them to science fiction writers. He built them using his knowledge of physics and astronomy and his imagination regarding what could be done in bizarre situations, and he was very, very good at what he did. He got paid for his worldbuilding—which he did in depth, so that writers only had to buy his work once, not pay him piecemeal.

But if worldbuilding isn’t your hobby, and it isn’t your job, then there is NO GOOD REASON to do all of it at once, and a multitude of good reasons not to.

If you’ve been consistently overbuilding before now, it’s time to let go.

If you haven’t yet been bitten by the bug, I hope this digression will serve as your inoculation against the sort of rabid overbuilding with which I hurt myself for so many years.

Onward.

Back to SANE Worldbuilding

Here’s how it works.

You start with a Dot world. Always. The Dot world will allow you to develop a few necessary questions, and a few necessary answers.

You write as much of the story as you can from that single Dot world. Sometimes, you’ll get the whole story from that, as I will with the story I’ll write from my “glossy black paint” world.

Where your questions lead you beyond what can be answered by your single Dot world, you expand to a Line world.

You develop the Line world, ask your story questions from it, write as much of the story as you can from those questions, and either finish the story or...

- Add another Dot world

- Expand your existing Line world

- Develop a Tube of Toothpaste world

The Tube of Toothpaste world is the biggest block of worldbuilding you’ll do in my SANE system, and even it is small. While you’re building it, you’ll stay focused on what you actually need to know as you’re writing, and you will not stray beyond that.

Dot, Line, and Tube of Toothpaste are the three building blocks of SANE worldbuilding. You can turn these three building blocks into everything from microworlds for flash fiction to built-out universes for open-ended series of stand-alone novels set in infinite universes (the sort of worldbuilding required for the most ambitious writing projects in fiction), and all without stopping your writing to spend a month or a year or a decade developing the world in which you intend to write someday.

For the writer...

...The purpose of worldbuilding is to quickly create the little piece of the living, breathing universe you need in order to add depth to the part of the story you’re writing right now.

So what will you learn from this course?

Course Objectives

By completion of Create A World Clinic, you will know and be able to effectively use the following:

The Three Building Blocks of Worldbuilding

The Dot World.

You’ll be able to identify and build Dot worlds and recognize the situations for which they’re a complete solution to your story problem—as well as those for which they’re only an appropriate starting point.

You’ll also build several Dot worlds.

The Line World.

You’ll be able to identify and build Line worlds, recognize when, along with Dot worlds, they’re the appropriate and complete solution for your story problem, and understand the story needs that will require you to add more extensive development.

You’ll also build several Line worlds.

The Tube of Toothpaste World.

You will be able to identify and build Tube of Toothpaste worlds without overbuilding them, and will be able identify the situation where your story will need this expanded development.

You’ll build at least one Tube of Toothpaste world.

The Three Universe Types for Writers

You will understand the universe types for fiction, and be able to choose and develop the correct type for your work, based on what you wish to achieve with the stories you’re writing. And you will build the starter pieces for each sort of universe.

The Container Universe.

All single stand-alone stories, including single stand-alone novels, live inside container universes. So do some story and novel series. You’ll understand what defines a container universe, and when it’s appropriate for the story or stories you want to write.

You’ll also build out the core stubs of a container universe.

The Knowable Universe.

Both knowable and infinite universes are the exclusive domains of series writers, but not all series writers will need either a knowable or an infinite universe. So you’ll learn to identify the writing goals and story objectives that will require you to develop a knowable universe for a series world.

And then you’ll build out the core stubs of a knowable universe.

The Infinite Universe.

Finally, you’ll learn to identify the writing goals and story objectives that will require you to develop an infinite universe for a series, and you’ll build out the core stubs of an infinite universe.

The Geek Deeps Expanded Worldbuilding System

SANE worldbuilding is not the only path to good worlds, and there are circumstances and legitimate reasons for some writers, some of the time, to build a whole lot of world before doing the writing. I do SANE worldbuilding now for my short work. But for the places where I intend to play for a long time, I do a lot more.

You’ll learn why writers build big, and when you need to...and if you’re following the career path where advance worldbuilding is the only way to go, you’ll slip into the Geek Deeps to build the world and the universe that will let you reach your goals.

You still won’t be immersing yourself in years of Tolkien-style development of languages, cultures, and world before you get to work. The much leaner Geek-Deep worldbuilding system is the process I used for my Korre stories, Talyn and Hawkspar. It’s also the re-build method I used when bringing my Cadence Drake series back from the dead. Though Deep-Geeking was intense while I was doing it, it was also only a couple of weeks each time before I hit the ground running, world in place and first chapter on the page.

But if you go Geek-Deep, you will have some maps when you’re done. Some well-developed set pieces you’ll work in. And, if you do the other two courses in this series, languages and cultures to fit them.

Finally, You’ll Complete A Story

From the writer’s perspective, there’s no point in building worlds if you don’t then use them to write stories you love.

To walk you step by step through the process of writing GOOD stories from start to finish, I’ve thrown in a free three-week class at the end of this course.

You’ll use the worlds you’ve built to write up to five stories you’ll love in class—stories you can then polish up and sell.

But first, let’s get back to building worlds.

CHAPTER 3

How to Use This Book

Your first time through Create A World Clinic, I recommend the following

- Your first time through this course, create new worlds rather than working with worlds you’ve already built. I have two reasons for recommending this.

The first is that your new worlds will not carry any baggage with them—you won’t have to remember what you’ve already done or used or said to avoid creating contradictions or breaking things.

The second is that you’ll learn to use the processes cleanly, without any preconceptions or any need to get protective over what you may have built or how you built it that doesn’t fit with the way this course works. This will allow you to find out which of my processes actually work for you, and which processes you were using before that you still prefer.

- Download and print off one complete set of your worksheets. The instructions for downloading your worksheets are at the back of the book.

It does not matter whether you purchased this course from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or my site or some other site where I might offer it in the future. It doesn't matter what format you're using. If you bought this course someplace other than my site, go all the way to the back to find out how you can get the worksheets PLUS the downloadable videos, maps, and other useful tools I’ve included in the price you’ve already paid—no extra charge.

You’ll save the worksheets in a binder following my simple organizational system, so you don’t end up re-inventing wheels and neighborhoods—the worksheets are both what you build on and what you track with, so using them will save you a fair amount of time.

- Read this course from start to finish once, doing one example of each exercise, simply to get the feel for the lightness of this process.

- Save your worksheets. Initially, you can store all of them in one ring binder or notebook. As you develop worlds you love and want to work in, however, you’re going to need to separate the sheets for those worlds into their own notebooks.

Every working world—that is, every world you’re actively using to create ongoing fiction, needs to have its own notebook, which needs to be labeled as such for quick identification. Do not frustrate yourself by having to dig through reams of unrelated paper to get to the material you need for the story you want to write right now.

- By the time you’re done, you’ll have more ideas than you can use for quite some time, so use the project priority list at the back of the worksheet pack to select only those ideas you really love and want to do soon, and list them. Never have more than five projects on your priority list—beyond that, you end up with clutter. If you have a sixth project that outscores your other five, cut your lowest-scoring current project and re-write the list. If you’re not willing to cut a project to make room for a new one, you’re not passionate enough about the new one, no matter what your score says.

- Use your priority list to make sure you don’t waste your time writing projects that bore you or that you hate—both obligation and the surprisingly common belief that you can’t come up with anything better because you’ve hit your ceiling are fixable. With obligation, you close out that contract or series and don’t accept follow-ups for the same book, (or if you’re working indie, you leave the character in his final book someplace fitting). With the sense that you’ve hit your ceiling, that you’re as good as you can get…you aren’t. None of us is ever as good as we can get. We can always learn more; we can always do better.

Just wait until you see what you can come up with over the next few days.

- This course is the final part of my three-book WORLDBUILDING SERIES. The first book, Holly Lisle’s Create A Language Clinic, and the second book, Holly Lisle’s Create A Culture Clinic, cover in detail the step-by-step processes for building names, concepts, languages, and cultures, philosophies, social constructs, and more that work as integral parts of your fiction to help you tell your stories better, give them deeper meaning, and allow you to create pieces that fit together into compelling whole stories.

All three books stand alone…but using all three together will allow you to add richness and power to your storytelling. I have been careful not to duplicate any exercises or processes within the three books, so you will not find rehashes of what you already knew in any of them.

This course is designed to be worked through comfortably in a week or two. If you’re in a huge hurry, you can probably do the core portion (skipping the Geek Deeps) in about three days.

I have not added any theory, any pronouncements on what you should do or how you should write, or any extra reading.

All you’ll find here is my process:

- How I worldbuild,

- Why each step works the way it does, and

- How you can do the same.

My process works with every type of fiction. You’ll be able to use the techniques I offer as-is, or develop variations that will work better for the way you think and create.

This course is a starting point. There is no One True Way to write fiction, no One Sacred Path to telling stories. And there is no One Rigid Process to building worlds. I was a heavy worldbuilder for years, and I sold books. I learned to become a light worldbuilder, and I sold books. There are a whole lotta ways to get where you want to go. I’m getting ready to show you a whole stack of them.

Write with joy, work with passion, and create what you love, and your writing time and your life will both be well spent.

Finally, a word on pronouns. I figure no matter how many other people take this course, you’re the only one reading this copy right now. So, because I am talking to one person at a time, I’m me, you’re you, you and I together are we, and everyone else is some variant of him, her, or them. I’ve found the courses work better when I write them this way.

Cheerfully,

Holly Lisle

CHAPTER 4

The Three Building Blocks of Worldbuilding

Assuming your started on the first page of the course, you’ve already built your first world. (If you haven’t, go back to the first page. That was not only a real part of the course—it was also the fundamental first building block in SANE worldbuilding.

A Quick Aside on SANE™ Worldbuilding

SANE is an acronym. It stands for:

- Simple

- Active

- Necessary

- Elements

Simple:

Simple means you do the absolute least amount of work possible to get the results you need. Dot Worlds are the simplest worlds you can build, and they’ll be the majority of what you build. You keep things simple for several reasons.

- First, the less you add in the way of complexity, the less likely you are to contradict something you’ve built but didn’t use later, when you discover what you really need.

- Second, if you focus on just what you need, you’ll avoid writing Death by Description sequences, which are one of the hallmarks of overdone worldbuilding. (DBD happens because you’ve built all this stuff, and you are hellbent on using it somewhere.) Death by Description is one variety of the infodump, and something to be avoided at all costs.

- Third, your Muse likes elbow room and empty spaces, and if you leave some, you’ll find that as you’re writing, your Muse will suggest small, relevant, wonderful details that simply cannot happen if you’ve already cluttered up the place you’re working with things you thought you might need.

Active:

Worldbuilding that’s any good at all is worldbuilding that shapes the story and affects the outcome. If the story you’ve set in London, England in 1890 could be dropped unchanged into Cleveland, Ohio in 1965, your worldbuilding is passive. It does nothing. This is a common flaw in beginners’ work—but I’ve seen it make its way into published fiction, too. It happens when writers tack place names and years onto stories that are based on their limited experience, a phenomenon I shorthand as Everyone Shops At My Mall.

With “Everyone Shops At My Mall,” the writer assumes that the instant in which he exists, in his place and in his skin, will be a familiar experience to anyone who picks up his work.

He also assumes that his experience is relevant and applicable to other times and other places.

He assumes that people in general think the way he thinks, value what he values, fear what he fears, and that at all times and in all places in the world, things have worked in pretty much the same fashion as they work for him.

Castles, he decides, are just another form of house, outdoor markets are like supermarkets, and people have always been able to buy clothes, food, other necessities and little luxuries.

The first thing you need to get out of your system when writing is “Everyone Shops At My Mall.”

Living in countries other than your own would help, especially if you have to learn another language, live in local housing, eat local food, and live on the local economy to do it.

Barring that, read. A lot. History, geography, and science will repay your efforts most richly.

Watch travel documentaries.

Get hold of old National Geographic magazines. The ones from the early 1900s are wonderful.

Always remember that your experience with life is unique, and shared by no one else on the planet—it is only by realizing that no one has the same experiences you have, and by finding ways to present your experiences so others will live them with you that you’ll write anything that will be readable ten years—or a hundred—from today.

When you do active worldbuilding, the first concept you toss onto the fire is “everyone.”

There is no such thing as everyone in the real world, and in fiction, the “everyone” concept is unbelievably destructive. Allowing yourself to think in terms of “everyone” when worldbuilding will make what you create passive. You will allow yourself to write about people who are all the same in places that are all the same—because this is what the concept of everyone requires in order to work.

Necessary:

Here’s the rule of thumb. Build today what you’ll use today. If you are not building exactly the bit of world you have to write in right now, your worldbuilding plans fail the test of necessary.

Having spent countless hours building, mapping, and laying out incredible destination points for my characters, only to replot the story afterwards to skip not just the town but the entire freakin’ planet, I can tell you that your idea to go ahead and build the Infinite Castle of Evil or the entire town of Perch Hollow in advance “so it will be there when I’m ready for it,” will not end in joy.

Necessary, however, is contextual. What you need to generate story questions for a one-off short story built on a Dot world and set in a Container universe is far different than what you’ll need to generate story questions for a group of interrelated series set in an Infinite universe. So I’ll define what’s SANE in each part of this process as we get to it.

Elements:

I’m going to borrow a bit from How To Revise Your Novel here, because I said this right the first time, and you might as well get the nice, clear explanation of worldbuilding elements I did in that course.

- Sets: A set is any location in the story, from a single room to a spaceship the size of a planet floating through the vast reaches of space. Sets have multiple components, some of which can be a bit tricky. Some items can be parts of a set if used one way, but props if used another.

- Props: A prop is any item in the story used by a character to affect the story. (The old rule is: If you show a gun on a wall at the beginning of your story, you have to shoot the gun by the end.) Props are easy to understand, but are frequently misused by writers who don’t get their heads into their worlds sufficiently, and who write, for example, feudal characters who have running water; toothbrushes; bathing; drinkable water; more than one set of clothing; socks or sweaters knit by their wives, mothers, sisters, or other females; waterproof boots; easy access to books; literacy; and on, and on, and on.

- Gimmicks: A gimmick is how anything in the story works. If your character drops an apple and the apple falls to the floor, that’s a gimmick. If your characters drops an apple and the apple floats away, that’s a gimmick, too. If your character drops an apple, and one time it falls to the floor, the next time it floats away, and the third time it turns into a baby dragon and attacks the character, that’s ALSO a gimmick (and one for which the writer had better have thought out a damn fine reason why).

Quick Note: Folks sometimes have problems with gimmicks, so here are a few more examples, both from the real world, and from speculative fiction, of what constitutes a gimmick, and the parts of it that you have to deal with in your fiction.

- Identifiable fingerprints are a gimmick of crime fiction. This gimmick relies on the knowledge that every individual has unique fingerprints, that hands excrete oil that leaves prints behind, and that there is some way to locate those prints on surfaces, and then connect them back to the one individual on the planet to whom they belong.

- Sexual attraction is a gimmick of romance novels. It requires the multiple assumptions  that people who meet will find each other attractive (whether on not the science of pheromones and compatible body chemistries is on the table or off), that this attraction will push the two characters who feel it to want to mate, and that this is something that is both good and worthwhile.

- Faster-than-light (FTL) travel is a gimmick of science fiction that requires that someone or something is able to circumvent the assumed limitations of the speed of light, and that vehicles or other means can be created to permit someone or something to pass from point to point at this speed intact.

- Music is a gimmick of whatever fiction you care to toss it into. It relies on the assumption that individual characters have a way of recognizing and understanding sound waves, that sound waves that utilize variations in rhythm and tone can be found pleasurable to those who translate them through hearing or other senses, and that someone would then care to intentionally create sound waves of varying rhythm and tone for no purpose other than the amusement of the creator or others.

- Magic is a gimmick: types vary, and every sort has rules, but for magic to be effective in any fiction, the rules must be applied consistently, and there must be both processes that work, and processes that fail. It helps a lot if there are also processes that backfire.

So. Those are the bits and pieces that define SANE worldbuilding.

On, then, to the three building blocks you’ll be putting together.

SANE-ly.

The Dot World

The concept of the Dot in worldbuilding is simple.

It is just this.

Something interesting happens here!

The Dot connects.

It brings together a tiny number of carefully selected, specific details into a single place in time and a single moment.

When you built your first Dot world back in Chapter 1, you didn’t build twenty or thirty different things. Not to start with. You built one thing, and developed the buds of a story around it.

It probably wasn’t even something that, at first glance, was very interesting.

Try telling someone, “Yes, my initial worldbuilding for this story consisted of glossy black paint.”

If you didn’t understand what sort of amazing things a writer could get from that detail, you’d assume you’d just come across someone in loose touch with reality.

But a Dot world isn’t just that first Dot. In my case, it was the glossy black paint, the source of the blood that made the paint necessary, and the artist who sought special inspiration when he painted certain women’s portraits.

THREE details.

In almost every case, when you have three details, you have enough to start plotting (or writing, depending on your preferred method) your story.

The Line World

The Line world is an expansion of the Dot world. It is two Dots, and one Line.

The Dot connects. The Line divides.

If you have a Dot on either side of a Line, then the Dots are different. That’s what the Line tells you.

And what the Line creates is conflict. Let me give you a real-world example.

When I was sixteen and my brother was ten, he was not allowed to come into the bedroom I shared with my twelve-year-old sister.

I, however, was supposed to leave the door open unless I was changing clothes.

Being sixteen, there were times when I did not wish to have to deal with my little brother. So I’d go into my room and grab my guitar or a book and immerse myself in my chosen world of the moment.

My brother was ten at the time, and resented the hell out of any place he was not allowed to be. So he would stand just across the invisible line—which would have been my door had I been allowed to close it.

And he would stare at me. Didn’t say anything. Didn’t do much. Stared. Made faces. Stared some more.

And I would get annoyed and yell at him to go away. And he’d say, “You can’t make me. I’m not in your room.”

And he wasn’t. So I couldn’t.

Instead, since I couldn’t walk over and drag him back to his own room without getting in trouble, I’d ignore him. He hated being ignored. I perfected the art of “utter deafness while reading,” and the art of “sitting on bed playing guitar loudly” and sometimes I’d stay tough longer than he was willing to stand and stare.

But sometimes not.

Tattling to my mother was losing—but sometimes I couldn’t ignore him as long as he was willing to wait to have his triumph. I’d get so annoyed I’d yell to my mother that he was looking at me, conceding defeat in doing so...at which point he retired the winner from that round of “who annoys whom the most.”

In this conflict, I was a Dot. He was a Dot. Our connection was that we were related, and stuck with each other—and even though most of the time we got along pretty well, a Line imposed by our parents put us into regular conflict. The door I could not close was the invisible Line, with the conflict built right in.

There are an infinite number of ways you can develop Line worlds, but they will always share these three essential characteristics:

- You will have two Dot Worlds.

- Elements from each Dot World will share connections, whether hidden or obvious.

- A Line will allow you to find the differences, and the connections.

The Line World is the second essential block in all worldbuilding.

The Tube of Toothpaste World

The Dot connects. The Line divides.

The Tube of Toothpaste limits.

And you may be wondering why anyone would want to LIMIT a world.

The Tube of Toothpaste World gives you extra detail for just this moment…and here is why you need it, and need to learn to love it.

The age of Earth, as currently figured scientifically, is roughly 4.54 billion years old.

If you're using the mystical model from one of a number of religions that posit a created Earth, stories claim 4,000 to 8,000 years, but ALSO claim a short period of creation time by one immortal, omnipotent prime mover or a finite and generally small number of immortal, omnipotent prime movers unhindered by biological or physical constraints.

No matter which model you accept personally to explain the existence of everything, and no matter whether either of these is a model you intend to use in your fiction, when you look around you can see that your home, your town, your region, your country, your continent, your hemisphere, your world, your solar system, and your sky are full of stuff.

And all of that stuff starts as atoms and builds from there (I am aware that atoms are comprised of much smaller particles, but the atom is the smallest discrete unit that maintains the characteristics of the whole, so for purposes of worldbuilding, atoms are complete building blocks. Quarks are not.)

The atom is the Dot of the universe.

Problem is, there are a LOT of Dots.

Whether you’re playing with a Terry Pratchett-style universe that WAS created (the Discworld) or operating under standard physics for your universe, you have to understand that you can’t create everything.

Maybe this seems obvious to you.

But this was where I started down the rabbit hole, and because I know I'm not alone in skipping over the life-altering importance of this truth, let me say this again.

You can’t create everything.

And NOT creating everything is where the Tube of Toothpaste comes in.

Toothpaste is interesting stuff. A little dab will do. Too much makes a mess, and will end up as a concrete blob in the sink if you don’t clean it up immediately.

And it comes in a tube that, used correctly, lasts a long time.

Your story world is to everything possible in worldbuilding what a tube of toothpaste is to the universe.

Your World : Worldbuilding :: Tube of Toothpaste : Universe

Think of the size of a dab of toothpaste on the tip of a toothbrush. If you follow manufacturers’ instructions in your toothpaste use, and not the picture on the box, you’re looking at a blob about the size of a pea. (Green, English, or garden. NOT early, tiny, or "baby.")

Now close your eyes and picture everything in the universe rolled up into one giant ball. Imagine familiar things like shoes and hats and plates and houses and cities and continents and planets and suns all racing toward each other and coalescing into a giant ball that blocks out the stars and keeps getting bigger as more of the universe squishes into it until everything that exists now, that existed in the past, and that will exist in the future is in that ball.

Scoot that image to the right side of your imagination. Hold it there.

Now on your left, you want a single ordinary-sized tube of toothpaste. And a toothbrush, with a pea-sized glob of toothpaste already on it. And you want these items as close to actual size an you can get them.

Because that tube of toothpaste represents all the SANE worldbuilding that fits into a novel.

And that dab of toothpaste on the toothbrush?

All the worldbuilding you need to write one scene.

The Tube of Toothpaste will save you from falling into your worldbuilding, and losing your time, your story, and your desire to write in the process.

CHAPTER 5

The WHY of the Dot World

Both your brain and your readers like the Dot world.

The Dot world is the cure for this problem:

7000 years ago, in the country of Tathfrog-As-It-Was, Queen Marigold of the Far High Towers of Plankton yearned for power, and in Castle Plankton on the Grey, she kept slaves and servants and serfs, and went where she pleased, and her maids-in-waiting feared her, as did the grooms in her courtyard, and her consort, the Earl of Fnarfarthing, and all the people of Tathfrog-As-It-Was, for she held in her right hand the Staff of I Get Anything I Want and on her left hand wore the Ring of I’ll Cook You If You Look At Me Sideways, and she’s dead and not coming back, but I’m going to tell you about her and her dead ambitions, and describe the castle and the costumes, and go on about it for the next thirty pages before I even start to tell you the story I’m actually here to tell you, because I built this stuff and somebody is damn well going to read it…

We’ll skip that next thirty pages, if you don’t mind.

This is what's called an Expository Lump. Those of us who loathe them have much crueller phrases for them. They are the anchor post and foundational monster of many, many prologues, and they exist because the only way most writers can figure out how to present worldbuilding is in huge expository lumps.

I'm going to teach you how to make your worldbuilding so seamless readers won't realize that it exists, or how completely it permeates the story they're reading.

To do this, I'm going to show you how to take apart something someone else has written to find the presence (or absence) of a living, breathing world.

So we’ll go straight to the DOT in the mess of information above, and we’ll move it where it needs to be. In the story’s Present, 7000 years away from that indigestible lump of backstory.

With the Dot world, instead of endless backstory and pointless overbuilding, you get Here and Now, wherever here and now might be. Watch.

EXAMPLE WORLD #2

Katie was walking along the path back to her dorm, kicking the gravel in her frustration, when something went “clink.”

Dusk was falling, and she was tired, but that had been a heavy clink—an expensive clink. She had a ton of trigonometry waiting on the third floor, and a miserable  hockey practice on crappy ice behind her, and the idea of something interesting between those two grim bookends sounded good.

She walked to where she’d thought she heard the metal sound, and crouched, and looked around. It was too dark to see clearly, but she had a little flashlight on her keychain. She pulled it out, flicked its light over the gravel, and something sparkled red at her.

Red. And gold. She picked it up. It was a ring, and looked as expensive as it had sounded. It was big and heavy enough to be a large man’s class ring, but first, it was sized to fit a woman’s finger, and second, it had nothing to do with higher education. The red stone formed the single, centered, enormous eye in a minutely detailed pure gold face distorted by pain and rage. She stared at that face, shining her flashlight over what was undeniably beautiful craftsmanship twisted to a hideous end.

When she looked at the eye, it seemed to look back at her. To make promises. She felt vengeance, she felt rage, she felt death and towering stacks of corpses and, and at the same time felt——racing beneath her skin——the hunger to bring pain and ruin, along with a triumphant thread of mad jubilation, berserk and bloody glee. With a single disgusted overhand movement, she flung the ring across the green and walked away.

In the history of the ring, she was the first person who’d touched it who hadn’t put it on.

The next person who touched it would.

Now you have an entire scene to work with, so you're going to get some dissection practice in. You need to know how to take things apart in order to put them together. (Writing and surgery have a lot in common.)

Your objectives are going to be:

- To discover the sets, props, and gimmicks in the world above.

- To discover how they've been used.

- And from them, to identify the Big Dot and its Support Dots.

Your Turn

When you’re dissecting a scene for worldbuilding, you’re looking for three elements.

The Set = Where this scene takes place.

Any Props = A prop is any item in the story used by a character to affect the story.

Any Gimmicks = A gimmick is how anything in the story works.

You’ll need to answer the following questions:

• Where am I?

• What’s going on?

• How does it work?

To do this and get all the critical detail, look for words or phrases that tell you:

1. WHEN the story takes place (Time period or year or civilization-level equivalent) Set

2. WHERE the story takes place (Galaxy, planet, hemisphere, country, city, town, site location [shopping mall, spaceship, cookie factory, wilderness], or any other locational details provided) Set

3. WHAT physical objects create the stage (backdrop, ground, and sky) Set

4. HOW the stage is lit Set

5. WHAT the core character’s start and end points are (The core character is the one who makes a critical change in the scene that moves the story forward. The core character can be different in every scene in a book, but will usually be the protagonist or antagonist) Set

6. BY WHAT MEANS does the core character move through the scene? Set

7. WHAT objects do characters use in the scene? Props

8. WHAT objects do characters use offstage which are implied in the scene? Props

9. WHAT do the objects do? Gimmicks

10. HOW do they do it? Gimmicks

So print off the Dissection instructions plus about four Dot World Dissection worksheets (if you don't have your worksheets yet, use this Get Your Worksheets Link to get them, print them off, and come back when you've finished filling out the sheets.

Get Your Worksheets:

http://howtothinksideways.com/worksheet-downloads/

[I’ll just wait here until you’re done.]

What I Got, What YOU Got…
and How You Use This

I’m going to bullet-point the results I got on my worksheet.

Hyphens will separate the categories Set, Prop, Gimmick; What do I know?; and, How do I know it?

NOTE: Here and throughout the rest of this course, I’ve done the same worksheets you’ve done. However, 8.5”x11” worksheets do not scan readably into ebook format, my writing is not all that neat to begin with, and for visually impaired writers, that content would become instantly inaccessible—whereas audio readers will have no problem with typed tables. And ebook formatting currently does not handle typed tables.

So throughout this course book, I have presented the worksheets I’ve done in typed-out list format. Each bullet represents one line of the worksheet. Where the worksheet has columns, I’ve separated column contents by using em dashes: —

This is not as pretty as formatted tables, but will make the course usable by a much broader group of writers.

On to what I got.

MY RESULTS

Worksheet columns are:

Set, Prop, or Gimmick | What do I know? | How do I know it?

- Set — core character may be at private school, college, camp, or in the military — “walking along the path back to her dorm”

- Set — the path is made of gravel — “kicking the gravel”

- Set — character moves across the set on foot — “walking along the path”

- Set — set is lit with natural light that is mostly gone — “Dusk was falling” + “too dark to see clearly”

- Gimmick — gravel does not clink when kicked. An object that is different than gravel, and does not belong on the path, appears — “something went clink” + “heavy clink” + “expensive clink”

- Prop - Implied props: trigonometry and other textbooks, hockey stick, mask or helmet, armor, big-ass bag for lugging it all around, skates with sharp blades — “ton of trigonometry waiting on the third floor” + “miserable hockey practice behind her”

- Set — TIME PERIOD is now or comparable to now, because a female age unknown (Katie) is on a dark path alone, and is playing organized hockey on some sort of campus, and has a key ring with a little flashlight — “miserable hockey practice” + “dorm” + “Katie” + “little flashlight on her keychain”

- Gimmick + Prop — electricity and standard physics work in this world. Technology is fairly modern; a flashlight can fit on a keychain — “little flashlight on her keychain”

- Prop — something cool, interesting, expensive, or otherwise attractive appears. People are wired to notice things that sparkle. — “something sparkled red at her”

- Set — she’s in college! How do I know? Because boys go to high school, but men go to college, and because of the reference to higher education — “men’s class ring” + “nothing to do with higher education”

- Gimmick — the ring does not fit the world it’s in; first part of the scene establishes normal physics; second part suggests high magic or future science. The ring appears to communicate with the mind or through the skin into the nervous system of the holder, pushing emotions and desires into the holder that either increase what’s already going on, or insert something entirely new — “It seemed to look back at her, to make promises” + “felt vengeance” + “felt rage” + “felt death” + “corpses” + “the hunger to bring pain and ruin” + “triumphant thread of mad jubilation, berserk and bloody glee”

- Prop — ring is made of beautiful materials and exquisite craftsmanship, but to carefully craft something expensive and hideous suggests it is EVIL and IMPORTANT — “red stone” + “pure gold face” + “undeniably beautiful craftsmanship twisted to a hideous end” + “in the history of the ring” + “first person who’d touched it who hadn’t put it on” + “the next person who touched it would”

From just over 300 words of scene, I ended up with 421 words of worldbuilding dissection.

It seems like finding that much information about only one aspect of the story—the world—would be excessive. But you’ll notice that the words conveying the information were actually fewer than the information they conveyed.

When you do ACTIVE worldbuilding, you’re counting on your reader to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you—for example, for your reader to subconsciously put your character at college without you having to write:

Katie Bartholomew was a freshman at Billingsward College, which sat on the outskirts of Billingsward, Ohio, and which she attended on a hockey scholarship. She was on her way home from hockey practice. Dusk was falling, and she was regretting the fact that she’d CLEPed two years of advanced math to get into trigonometry, because she was tired and hockey had gone badly and now she had to do an enormous math assignment before she could relax.

This is expository worldbuilding. It is passive. In this example, I’m telling my readers what’s going on, rather than showing what’s going on—and this is boring.

Worse, I have introduced two Dots into this example that look important, but that are going to have no bearing on the story. The name and location of the college in the first sentence of the story suggest that the story will be about college, and this particular college will matter greatly in the story. The mention of her hockey scholarship, also in the first sentence, suggests the same.

The reader’s first impression of the story is “this story is going to be about women’s college hockey.” People who keep reading beyond Sentence One will be disappointed to discover it isn’t. People who aren’t interested in women’s college hockey will stop reading at Sentence One.

This is how the wrong start to your story will lose you readers. Folks who test-read the first couple sentences and think "Oh, good, a story about college women's hockey!" are going to be disappointed, and blame you. Readers who test read the first couple of sentences and think "Oh, gawd, a story about college women's hockey!" are going to drop the book and back away, and if you had done a better job of actively worldbuilding the first page, you would have won some of them to what the story is really about.

Only those who know your name and have liked your past work enough to trust you to entertain them will take a chance on it and have some possibility of liking what they read.

The following two paragraphs cover the same amount of material, while making sure the important bits are what you get first.

Katie was walking along the path back to her dorm, kicking the gravel in her frustration, when something went “clink.”

Dusk was falling, and she was tired, but that had been a heavy clink—an expensive clink. She had a ton of trigonometry waiting on the third floor, and a miserable hockey practice behind her, and the idea of something interesting between those two grim bookends sounded good.

First, let’s break out the first sentence/paragraph and look at it closely. A woman identified only by her first name is walking back to her dorm, kicking what happens to be available, and something that DOES NOT FIT what she’s doing appears on the scene.

Woman, gravel, path, and dorm draw a sketchy picture in the reader’s mind, but “clink” says, “Whoa! Gravel doesn’t clink!”

That “clink” introduces my Primary Prop Dot (the ring) for the entire story. Because this is a short story, this is the right place for the first hint of it to appear. In novels, you do a Teaser Prop Dot, because you want more room to build before you bring in the big guns.

My Teaser Prop Dot in Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood was the corpse welded into the locker with Cady. The corpse wasn’t what the core story was about, but it was the path by which the main characters arrived at the core story.

My Teaser Prop Dot in Warpaint was two thousand or so starving, mindless blood-drinkers weighing down Cady’s shuttle so she couldn’t take off. Again, not the core of the story, but the path by which she discovered the core story.

There have been times in earlier books where I did not put my Primary Prop Dot or Teaser Prop Dot in early enough.

You have to know the Prop Dot needs to be there before you can put it there on purpose every time.

I didn’t know how important it was when I started. Hell, I didn’t even know it existed.

I’ve written a number of novels I’d have started differently if I’d understood the importance of putting this tiny segment of worldbuilding right in line one, and I expect they would have sold better, simply because people would have gained an innate sense of what the story was going to be about from the first sentence.

You might not be able to get your Primary or Teaser Prop Dot into the first sentence. But hint at it immediately, and get it as close as you can.

This will make a tremendous difference for you in how quickly readers get on board with your stories. This Prop Dot, which is tiny but critical, sets up the reader’s expectations for your story.

IMPORTANT: The primary prop in your worldbuilding is not what the story is about—in the case of my example above, yet another story about a magic ring would be both stupid and painful. The story is about what happens to someone who chooses to accept the evil of the ring, versus the person who refused that same power and corruption.

Your Primary Prop Dot or Teaser Prop Dot is the gun that must be fired.

Whatever you create as your Primary Dot becomes the mechanism you use to bring about the core change in your story. If you’re writing a longer work and starting with a Teaser Prop Dot, you’ll use this to bring your readers to the later and larger Primary Dot, which will bring about the core change in your book.

On to the second paragraph. In it, I manage to avoid introducing false essentials (the name of the college, the existence of Katie’s scholarship or its relation to her hockey playing).

But I do mention both hockey and a trigonometry assignment, which imply the existence of a hockey stick, and the existence of a big, heavy trigonometry book. And these, lightly suggested in the second paragraph, call themselves to my attention as Tools of the Resolution: two props my main character will use against whatever it is that the user of the ring can do with the ring.

Realize that I did no preplanning on the story. I wrote the whole EXAMPLE #2 scene in one ten-minute timed run, and the previous example of what not to do, plus my commentary on what was wrong with it, in about twenty minutes.

It’s taken me much, much longer (a couple of full writing days) to dissect what my subconscious mind, my conscious mind, and my fingers threw together in a fraction of that time.

Dissection is a comparatively slow process, but learning to do it is essential. When you can see the bits and pieces of world in someone else’s work, or discover where they should be, but are shockingly missing, you build inside yourself the ability to discover these same virtues or flaws in your own work.

Your Turn

PART ONE: Take a few minutes now to look over anything you missed in writing down the pieces of worldbuilding in EXAMPLE WORLD #2. Write them in, and then figure out why you missed them. What was it about them that made you not see them as parts of worldbuilding.

PART TWO: Dissect the Dot world from the first 308 words of my novel Warpaint.

(I used my own book for this example because 1) it has all the elements in place that I’m teaching you to create, and 2) I don’t have to jump through anyone’s hoops to obtain the rights for you to use this text, because I own them.)

Crazed, starved, they clung all over my shuttle’s hull, bashing at it with anything they’d been able to grab. Those crammed up against the moleibond forward viewport were trying to bite me, unable to understand why they could see me, but couldn’t reach me. The screeching and clicking of their teeth and claws on the hull made my skin crawl.

Insane, all of them. Staring, mindless monsters—Legends, they called themselves when they were functioning normally, or vampires, though in truth they were neither. They were humans who’d changed themselves into horrors.

They’d bled dry the little moon I was trapped on, and without fresh human blood to drink, hadn’t been able to hang onto their sanity long enough to escape. Starvation had stripped them of their pretense of humanity, revealing their pure essence. It didn’t kill them, though. It would eventually kill them...probably. I knew they could exist in this nightmare state for months. Maybe they could go on this way for years. I’d never seen one dead of starvation.

But they had to starve to death sometime, didn’t they?

I would have destroyed them, had there been fewer of them, had there been more of me, had I had a way to shoot them with the one weapon that would have destroyed them—my blood. Only by my best guess, there were a couple thousand of them on and around my shuttle, swarming over it and me like ants on sugar. Like rats on a corpse. Like... name your own nightmare.

They blocked my sky.

My shuttle hull was moleibond. Best stuff in the universe, moleibond: light, impervious to radiation, tough as hell. You can subject it to massive gravities, hit it with fire or light of any composition or in any concentration, slam it with projectiles of any composition, and you won’t scratch it.

Excerpted from Warpaint © 2013 by Holly Lisle. All Rights Reserved.

PART THREE: Using the excerpt above, read my first sentence, find the Teaser Prop Dot, and even if you know how the book comes out, write down what a reader new to the book and the author will expect from only what is presented in the first sentence.

PART FOUR: Choose one novel you've read all the way through at least once, and dissect that opening for active worldbuilding, looking for the elements you've learned in this chapter.

PART FIVE: Using the novel from Part Four, read the author’s first sentence, find whatever presents itself as the Primary or Teaser Prop Dot, and even though you know how the book comes out, write down what a reader new to the book and the author will expect from only what is presented in the first sentence.

Then figure out the point at which the author introduces his Teaser Prop Dot, and decide whether the author has presented the world of his story clearly, and along with it what the reader can expect the story to be about, in this length of time.

BONUS DISSECTION EXERCISE

Dissecting A Broken Story:

To get some additional practice in tearing your own work apart in a useful fashion, go through the first scene of a story or novel you’ve either written or started, and using the Dot World dissection worksheets, carefully study your own work for the presence or absence of active worldbuilding. Build out a Dot World from your dissection. Dissection is one of a number of worldbuilding techniques you can use to come up with ways to fix broken or stalled stories.

Early work, 30-page novel starts, and other manuscripts you've shoved under the bed and given up on are wonderful practice manuscripts for the dissection exercise. Always save your work.

A New Dot World from Three Pedestals

For the work you're going to do in Chapter 6 with our line worlds, you're going to need a second Dot world, as well as a new Set Dot, a Prop Dot, and a Gimmick Dot.

So now you're going to build an entirely new world using the exercise below, which is an alternate way to get your Dot World.

Remember that you do not have to build a new set or prop or gimmick for every scene. When you’re writing a novel, you simply need to look at your existing Sets, Props and Gimmicks in new ways.

The following exercise has several sections, each with its own worksheets. You’ll have something surprising by the end of this.

Print off one set of Dot World: Three Pedestals worksheets now. Read the instructions at the front of the worksheet section before you start into the exercise below.

Your Turn

SECTION ONE

Close your eyes and imagine an unlit stage. You’ll see three pedestals in a minute. Each will have something on it, which, when that particular pedestal’s light goes on, your Muse (right brain) will provide for you.

The first light goes on, illuminating a tiny slice of a location. The slice you can see is as tall as you, and about an inch (or a couple centimeters) wide. When you walk up to the pedestal, peek through the slice. You can look up as high as you like, and you can look down as far as you like, but even with one eye right up against the opening, you can only see the space a few inches to either side, and no farther than ten feet (three meters) straight ahead.

Write down the FIRST image that catches your eye in your new world. It can be anywhere, anywhen.

When you’re done, you’ll have your Setting Dot.

When you’re done, read my example on the following page. Then go to SECTION TWO.

What I Got

Prop Dot

- What do you see in your slice?

Meadow, summer with green and gold, the grass as high as my eyes, though I think I’m lying on my stomach.

- Describe color, texture, materials, age, and anything else you can know from the small portion you can see, including whether it stands alone or is part of something bigger.

Butterflies float over my head—blue, gold, striped yellow-and-black, bright red—and the sun is hot but the breeze has a chill in it. The clouds scud above, bright and fluffy but growing taller, with the first hints of darkness on their underbellies. Flowers bloom, tiny on their tall stems, tiny dots of the same colors as the butterflies. I can hear insects, I can smell the crushed grass and dry earth beneath me, and hints of the little weedy blooms.

- If what you can see is part of something bigger, describe what that something is.

The land is part of rolling hills, part of nearby cliffs and caves that I know and have been in. There is a farm nearby, though I cannot see it, and a watering pond for cattle, though I can neither see nor hear nor smell them or the murky, stagnant smell of the pond.

This slice of world was completely unexpected. It came out of my childhood, out of tromping around the Ohio hills in the southeastern part of the state alone, out of having the freedom to climb trees and play in streams and walk through meadows and woodlands and stretch out on sun-warmed sandstone, to bask in the heat of the day, or to watch and be surrounded by birds and bugs and snakes the other animals that lived all around me.

Until I closed my eyes and found myself back there, I had no idea how much I missed the place, or how deeply it had burrowed beneath my skin.

Your Turn

SECTION TWO

Close your eyes again, look at the second pedestal as the light goes on. This time you see an object. It can be any size, any shape, and due to the magic of the Muse, it will still fit on the pedestal. You might not know what it is to start with, but if you don’t, you’ll figure it out.

Go to your SECTION TWO worksheet, write a clear description of the object you see, and then answer the questions that follow. When you’ve answered them all (and written any extra information into your notebook), come back here.

You have now developed your Prop Dot.

Save your work.

Take a look at what I got in the next page.

Then go to SECTION THREE.

What I Got

Prop Dot

- What do you see in your slice?

Angled cutting disks, a couple dozen of them, the red paint on the bar connecting them chipped, the metal rusted in places. But the disks are freshly sharpened.

- What is your emotional reaction and first thought when presented with this object.

That it’s going to push the rabbits and groundhogs from their burrows, and disturb the place I love to come to get away.

- What secret do you know about this object?

That it is both the means to sustaining my ongoing survival, and my enemy.

- What is its history?

It’s some sort of turf cutter meant to be pulled behind a tractor. The field in which I have been stretched out has been lying fallow for some years, but is now to be put back into rotation for new crops in the coming year. So the turf is to be cut and the nitrogen-rich plants growing on the ground are to be plowed under to serve as a gentle over-wintering fertilizer. I know we need the crops, but love the field in its untouched state.

Your Turn

SECTION THREE

You have two illuminated pedestals, and only one remaining which is dark. From the darkness on that pedestal, you hear a sound. (In variants of this exercise you can smell something, or walk over and touch something. If you’re really brave, you can stick out your tongue and taste something, but I’ve had my Muse pull some hideous tricks on me when I do that, so I’d exercise a bit of caution against the potential gross-out here.)

In all cases, no matter how close you get, the darkness remains absolute.

On your worksheet, write down the detail you have gleaned by using one of your other senses.

Now you get faint light from pedestal three, only enough to catch an impression of movement. Describe the manner of movement, whether mechanical or fluid or jerky, or whatever else you see, without trying to identify the source.

Finally the light comes all the way up and you see what has moved, melted, shifted, or in some other fashion changed.

On your worksheet, write down what you see, then describe what you discovered.

When, you’re done, you’ll have your Gimmick Dot.

Take a look at my gimmick, starting on the next page.

Then move on to writing your short scene.

What I Got

Gimmick Dot

- What sensation do you first experience emanating from the absolute darkness of the fourth pedestal?

I get the sharp whiff of ozone, the sense of dampness in the air, the weight of presence and the danger that accompanies it.

- As dim light begins to illuminate the space above the pedestal, you will briefly glimpse movement.

I catch the jagged dance of white light hitting the ground.

- When the lights come all the way up, you will know that something has changed. Describe the change, and the inanimate force that has caused it.

There was a man and an old tractor, and ground turning in slow and steady rows behind him. He was hurrying against the coming storm, wanting to have the field done, wanting to move on to something different the next day.

But lightning struck the tractor, and the man atop it. Both stopped together, machine and man.

Your Turn

Using what you got from your Set, Prop, and Gimmick Dots, write out a short scene on the worksheets.

When you’ve finished, turn the page, and I’ll show you what I got.

What I Got

What follows is pure first draft of a completely nonmagical, non-fantasy world. I’d have to write more of the story and more from this world to have any idea what needed to be changed. I’m not going to do that.

From what I have in the 395 words that follow, you’ll get a clear picture of the three points of my new Dot World: Set, Prop, and Gimmick.

I lay in my little nest in my meadow, crying at the approach of The Monster on the last day of my summer vacation, the last day of my freedom.

The moment smelled of dust, of the heat of the day, of the last blooms of flowers that would soon blow to seed, of crushed grass. Bees buzzed lazily from flower to flower, but they would soon scatter ahead of the coming rain. I could smell ozone, and feel a tingle in the air, the weight of damp in the quickening breeze.

I could hear the storm’s promise in the way distant trees rustled their leaves. I could see it in the darkening bellies of the sheepclouds skuddering overhead, getting bigger and fatter and faster all at the same time.

I didn’t cry for fear of the coming storm, though, or from the slavery of the classroom on the morrow.

I cried because my father, Destroyer of Nests and Scatterer of Bunnies and Ruiner of Secret, Private Places, was coming with the tractor to tear up the earth on which I lay with the sharp blades of his pet horror, which I’d named The Monster, which he called the disk harrow.

He was coming to ravage my tiny kingdom, this fallow field on our farm that had lain dormant as long as I could remember; this place that had become my safe place, my secret place, my hideaway at the far end of Everything We Owned.

The families of field mice and rabbits I had watched through much of the spring and all of the summer would be displaced, and the hawks that hung in the air high overhead, waiting for the slightest twitch from my small companions would have the gift of mice and rabbit lives when their runs were ripped open and the inhabitants revealed.

Perhaps the storm would save most, though my father was running ahead of it. I could hear the tractor coming, and it was a small field. He’d have it turned in no time.

And in that moment, I wished that the storm would stop the hawks from hunting, but more, that it would stop my father from tearing at the earth. I wished it, I wanted it.

What I wished for, I got.

And all the unwishing in the world changed not a shred of what came next.

Since I built this world from intentional Set, Prop, and Gimmick Dots, I ended up with the the start of a story I intended. But dissection of this first scene will allow me to change the direction of the story even as I build toward the planned conflict of the narrator’s father and the coming storm.

Here’s where dissection gives you tools to find places of potential misdirection, surprise conflict, and other fun twists and turns to inject into your work.

So let’s dissect this last scene together before we move on.

As before, hyphens will separate the categories Set, Prop, Gimmick; What do I know?; and, How do I know it?

MY RESULTS (much shortened—this is not a complete dissection)

- Set — core character is outdoors, but may be in either a real world, a fantasy world, or a crossover universe — “in my meadow,” “summer vacation,” “last day of freedom,” “approach of The Monster”

- Gimmick — the promise of a coming storm appears in the second sentence, which demands that the storm play a critical role in the plot of the story — “they would soon scatter ahead of the coming rain,” “feel a tingle in the air,” “smell ozone,” “sheepclouds skuddering,” more...

- Set — character takes in her world knowing that it is to be taken from her — “coming to ravage my tiny kingdom,” “Destroyer of Nests and Scatterer of Bunnies and Ruiner of Secret, Private Places,” “families of field mice and rabbits I had watched through much of the spring and all of the summer would be displaced,” “hawks that hung in the air high overhead, waiting for the slightest twitch from my small companions would have the gift of mice and rabbit lives”

- Prop — the tractor’s disk harrow — “was coming with the tractor to tear up the earth on which I lay with the sharp blades of his pet horror, which I’d named The Monster, which he called the disk harrow”

So we find near the end that the Monster named in the first sentence is not a character, but a prop, and a farm implement at that.

And the gimmick, the storm that’s coming, is promised in the last three paragraphs to wreak some form of havoc on the narrator’s world.

This is a nice example of a completely nonmagical world, in which the conflict can be about the girl’s guilt over wishing her father ill for plowing up the meadow right before he dies from a lightning strike on a tractor.

This isn’t a story I’d care to write, but it does demonstrate how literary and mainstream fiction can be worldbuilt from the same processes that can be used to create genre fiction.

* * *

As you have discovered, SANE worldbuilding at the Dot level is very small, but pervasive. It hides in a character’s foot kicking gravel, in the color of the light that shines through a window, in the sound a marble makes when it hits a tile floor, in a hint of lavender in the air. Done well, worldbuilding will touch most sentences you write in ways invisible to the reader, only calling attention to itself when you bring forward something critical to the story. The rest of the time, it will wrap your world around your readers and make it live for them.

CHAPTER 6

World #2: The Line World

Build Your World to Give You SANE Conflict

It’s worksheet time again.

If you’ve done the Dot World exercises, you now have two small, unique, functional worlds.

IF you followed instructions, they should also be DIFFERENT worlds.

If they aren’t, go back to World #1: The Dot World, and using either exercise you like, build a second world that is NOT simply continued development of your first world.

When you have two unrelated worlds, get them out. Put both of them in front of you, side by side.

I’m doing this, too. I’ll use my “Glossy Black Paint” world, and my “Scary Gold Ring” world for this exercise. As we did before, I’ll walk you through what you’ll be doing in the exercise, you’ll do your exercise, and when you’re done, I’ll show you what I built, and go briefly into how I got there.

The Exercise

Right now, you have two unrelated Dot worlds. How unrelated can they be for this to work?

They can have much in common, or nothing in common at all.

Look at what I’ve built:

One world far enough back in history that glossy black paint or paint covered with varnish is available but Luminol or other forensic tests are not readily available. I’m seeing this as late 1800’s, set either in the US or somewhere in the UK. The story is, so far, purely a creepy serial killer story with no other elements.

A second world where magic appears, where my young woman who plays hockey and studies trig is the possible protagonist, and where a ring connected to evil is about to start causing trouble.

And I’ll say right at the start that I like both worlds as they are, and though I have not done this exercise yet, I intend to USE both stories as they are. You can do the same thing if you’re excited about your first two worlds.

You’re going to build a third world, however—a Line world—first by building Strange Connectors, then by finding out what you’d know If Walls Could Talk….

Both are fun games, and both are techniques you’ll be able to use in getting great, in-depth detail for your fiction from now on.

Your Turn

Your objective with Strange Connectors is to find ways to build meaningful interaction between your Sets, Props, Gimmicks, and Characters of any two Dot Worlds, no matter how unrelated.

If you’ve built a small-town cozy mystery Dot World, and a far-future high-tech interstellar FTL (Faster-Than-Light) travel world, you’ll discover by doing this exercise how the two of them can fit together into a single story.

I love this exercise. This is one way to train your brain to give you stories WAY outside the box, but that still encompass everything you love to write.

The rule for this exercise is: Use only what you’ve already built.

Select any four of the following questions, and write out one answer for each of your two worlds in the appropriate column on your worksheets.

- How does your Set in your World 1 connect to your Set in your World 2? The connection can be physical, emotional, temporal, locational, or it can be a similarity you did not notice when you built your two sets, but see now.

- How does your Prop in your World 1 connect to your Prop in your your World 2? Use any of the connectors I’ve listed above (physical, emotional, temporal, locational, or a similarity you did not notice) or it can be a connection you come up with.

- How does your Gimmick in your World 1 connect to your Gimmick in your World 2? Same as above.

- How might any character you’ve created in your World 1 connect to any character you’ve created in your World 2? (The development of in-depth characters is far outside the scope of this course. My Create A Character Clinic covers that material in depth. However, if you build worlds, people will come.)

- Or mix them up. How does a World 1 Set connect to a World 2 Prop, or a Gimmick, or a character, or the reverse?

So.

Print off your Line World Strange Connectors worksheets, and fill them out. Then come back here and I’ll show you my answers.

What I Got

In the interests of readability for the folks using this in e-book format (and because my handwriting on my worksheets was atrocious, so print book folks are not missing anything except eyestrain), I’m going to skip inserting table images here and use text instead.

The first two Strange Connectors I chose between Glossy Black Paint World and Evil Ring World were obvious.

I decided to ask about the connection between the paint and the ring. Here are the answers I got.

PAIR ONE

WORLD - Black Paint

Question: How do my World 1 Prop (the Black Paint) and my World 2 Prop (the Evil Ring) connect to each other?

The Black Paint is connected to the Evil Ring by blood. The blood belongs to the woman who wore the ring and who was murdered up against the wall, and it still lingers there.

WORLD - Evil Ring

The Evil Ring is connected to the black paint by memory. As she lay dying, the woman who wore it bound herself to the ring with the blood of the man who murdered her, using the very trick she’d learned from him—and the ring remembers.

From there I considered my options—the things that I knew existed in my two tiny dot worlds.

In the paint world, I had:

- the black room,

- a whole bunch of public paintings sold to the general public,

- a whole lot of private paintings of an unknown nature sold to private collectors,

- a LAST painting,

- blood,

- bodies of murdered women,

- the artist/murderer,

- his private customers,

- his public customers.

In the evil ring world, I had:

- hockey sticks,

- hockey skates and equipment,

- textbooks,

- the college campus,

- professors,

- students,

- alumni,

- Katie, the woman who doesn’t put on the ring,

- the unknown woman who DOES put on the ring.

You might be wondering why I don’t include the universe of the artist’s past or the universe of Katie’s present in my lists.

It’s simple.

The Story Universe cannot be a detail of itself, or of its subsets.

Dot Worlds are subsets.

Line Worlds are subsets.

Every other World Type and Universe Type I show you how to build will be subsets of my “Story Universe.”

Why?

Because the instant you try to treat the Story Universe as a detail, you go into Overbuilding Mode. Suddenly you throw yourself into looking at world physics; the development of broad theories of magical laws; all the houses around the house the artist occupied and the past histories of the neighbors so that you can find out “what the neighbors knew;” all the places Katie went besides to college; side trips into the forensics of the late 1800’s in your alternate universe; maps; costumes; languages; vocabularies; cultures; religions; political systems—and all of these are related to your Story Universe, but not to your story’s HERE and NOW.

This is the High-Speed Freeway Down The Rabbit Hole, and having lived down there in the cluttered dark for a long time—to my significant financial and artistic detriment—my objective is to keep you off that road and get you to your actual destination—Completed Fiction—in a timely fashion.

Worldbuilding the little details will give you everything you need and want in your Story Universe as you go.

Your world is in the details, and a few compelling details will bring to life a story that would drown in a worldbuilding infodump.

Remember, The Dot World consists of a handful of small, specific details in the story’s here and now.

When you get a Set, a Prop, and a Gimmick, you have everything you need.

The Line World consists of the differences between two Dot Worlds, and their connections.

The Line World: Something is different between the two Dots.

When you’ve discovered the Connections and Differences between any two Dot Worlds, you’re done.

So I did not go near my Story Universe for either Dot World.

As you read through my short list of the essential elements in each of my two Dot Worlds, above, you’ll notice that I got a lot of people—whom I don’t want to use for worldbuilding.

All worldbuilding exercises will suggest characters to you, and most of the time you’ll want to ignore them. When you don’t, they’ll pull you away from your main characters and the story you want to write.

You’ll also notice, however, that I got a number of useful non-character details I’d specifically noted in my little build-outs in the Dot section. I also got details implied as existing by the nature of the worlds I’d built.

So I decided for my second Strange Connector pair to pick one item that had been mentioned, and one that had been implied: The Private Paintings (mentioned), and The College (implied). Here’s what I got for these.

PAIR TWO

WORLD - Black Paint

Question: How do my World 1 Prop (the Private Paintings) and my World 2 Set (the College) connect to each other?

The Private Paintings — One of the paintings—the artist’s last one—is of the woman who wore the ring. In the painting she is wearing the ring, and nothing else, and the paint with which the artist started to paint her eyes is mixed with her blood.

WORLD - Evil Ring

The College Campus secretly holds an extensive collection of the private paintings done by the killer artist—several professors and a number of talented male alumni are devotees of the artist and his methods.

I decided to go for the difficult and unlikely with my third choice, so I chose The Artist’s Public Customers (which I used as a collective noun, not as an individual noun like The Woman Who Put On The Ring) from the Black Paint world, and Hockey Sticks from the Evil Ring world.

I couldn’t see where I could go with this. I had to laugh at the result my Muse tossed to me.

PAIR THREE

Question: How do my World 1 Inhabitants (the Public Customers) and my World 2 Prop (the Hockey Stick) connect to each other?

WORLD - Black Paint

The Artist’s Public Customers — They are connected to Hockey Sticks through commerce. Katie’s great-great-grandfather, a hockey equipment manufacturer, commissioned a portrait of his wife from the artist that the family still has. (She’s wearing early hockey equipment and holding a hockey stick).

WORLD - Evil Ring

Hockey Sticks are connected to the Public Customers through Katie, who plays hockey because she fell in love with the portrait of her great-great-grandmother and the idea of her relative, a woman in a restrictive world, being daring and a rebel. Family lore is that her ancestor actually played.

I have a lot of options, but I ran out of ones that clearly make sense back in Pair Two. I’m intentionally avoiding building out details of characters, because I want you to see how you get characters, along with plot and conflict, FROM worldbuilding elements. I got both a manufacturing grandfather and an inspirational rebel grandmother from the pair above.

On to Pair Four, where the pickings have become really slim. I don’t want to use any more collective people nouns. So this leaves me with a few unpromising possibilities. From them, I’ll pick what seem to me to be the most important of the remaining details: The Bodies of Murdered Women from the Black Paint world, and Textbooks (which strike me as a crummy choice from really thin options) from the Evil Ring world.

(Quick time-traveling note from my future: After writing this section, I’ve discovered I was wrong. Textbooks are a huge, essential detail. Wait until you see how.)

What I got in this fourth pair is not fun at all. But when I got it, I also got a lot more of the story, including the motivation of the Evil Ring, the connection between the Katie and the woman who puts on the ring, and the direct connection between the killer/artist and the college.

PAIR FOUR

Question: How do my World 1 Prop (the Bodies) and my World 2 Prop (the Textbooks) connect to each other?

WORLD - Black Paint

The Bodies of Murdered Women—are connected to Textbooks by the method of the women’s murders, which the artist used to create magic, which he recorded in detail, and with which he created a series of horrific yet compelling paintings considered by his devotees to be masterworks.

WORLD - Evil Ring

Textbooks—are connected to the bodies of murdered women by teaching. The college houses a school of art in which a few professors teach selected students the methods of the killer/artist from his own writings. The professors and students privately practice these methods and sell these paintings to alumni and other devotees of the killer/artist’s philosophy and teachings.

But what my subconscious mind was throwing at me while it was pitching these connections were the following OTHER connections.

The Evil Ring and its business on the campus—The murdered woman who put her spirit into the ring at the moment of her death was the artist’s long-time lover and assistant in both his public paintings and his private ones. And she was very beautiful. She found his private subjects for him, lured them to his studio, and got rid of their bodies when he was done with them.

But she brought back a woman both more beautiful and more twisted than she was, and the artist secretly painted his accomplice’s portrait instead of the portrait of the woman whom he had chosen to become her replacement. When he brought his unsuspecting ex-lover into the room to kill her, and to paint her eyes with paint made from her blood, he dealt her an incapacitating blow, but not one immediately fatal.

She knew what was coming, though, and killed him before she died, and used his blood to put her spirit into the ring instead of the painting as he’d intended.

And now she—evil and twisted and trapped by her own hand in the ring—is out to destroy men, as well as any women who wear her ring. This is the first time she’s ever been close to the campus where her lover’s followers congregate. Before this, she’d enslaved her human wearers to kill any men available. The women always die badly eventually, because the spirit haunting the ring loathes them as much as she hates men, but she makes sure the ring finds its way to another hand sooner or later. She ceased to be a thinking human long ago—she has become an embodiment of rage, vengeance, and destruction.

Katie and the woman who put the ring on—are either best friends, or lovers, or Katie has a secret crush on the woman, who may or may not be a suitable object of affection. But Katie, who is now linked to the ring because of that brief but magic-imbued physical contact with it, can find the ring and its wearer, and will go to the defense of the woman who matters to her.

The killer/artist and the college—are connected by the killer artist’s will, which left his extensive fortune for the founding of an art school, with the understanding that his style and process would be part of the curriculum for the sort of students who would appreciate it, and his lawyer and executor, both collectors of his private paintings, made sure that his last orders were carried out.

How to Change Direction

As I said, not pleasant stuff. Clearly some part of my subconscious mind has been digging around in the Big Box of Bad Things we have shoved clear in the back of its room again.

As a result, the Black Paint half of the world I’m building is drifting out of the realm of what I want to write right now, and into the realm of the…well…squicky.

I took on the decidedly squicky (the word is, as far as I can figure, an amalgam of squeamish + icky) in Last Girl Dancing, one of my suspense novels. I hit squick right in the middle of Vengeance of Dragons, the second book of my fantasy SECRET TEXTS trilogy. And in several spots in Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood, my first CADENCE DRAKE novel, I danced through some decidedly horrific moments.

I’m not a tender flower: I perfectly happy delving through the twisted, the horrifying, and the perverse in search of truly awful conflicts to set against my protagonists.

There are stories where squick is necessary, villains for whom squick is perfect, and heroes for whom fighting squick is essential…

…But sometimes, even if that’s where your worldbuilding is leading, and even if sometimes it’s what you want to write, it simply isn’t what you want to write right now.

You never have to pursue a story direction just because that’s where your story is currently taking you.

I had intended to build out whatever I’d developed above with the If Walls Could Talk exercise.

However, my current worldbuilding is taking on some elements I’m not in the mood to pursue—two serial killers from the past who murdered each other, a whole school of art devoted to killing its subjects...no. Not in the mood for that.

I may go back and pick up the Line World I’ve just developed at another time. Meanwhile, however, there are ways to switch into a direction I’d rather pursue right now.

You can use the following exercise as an alternative Line World developer. However, If Walls Could Talk is an especially good way of jumping from a train you don’t want to ride to one you do.

Here’s what you’ll do:

- develop a few new Dot Worlds,

- do a Line World between the most interesting of the new worlds and the Dot World you still want to use,

- and run a quick interview.

Here’s how you do it.

Make a short list of Sets, a short list of Props, and a short list of Gimmicks. I recommend building out three worlds because while it’s entirely possible to come up with a world that’s dull, you’re more likely to get at least one that’s pretty good if you do three.

Start with SETS.

For Sets, your Dot is made up of the most important three details you can see right in front of you through a crack in the darkness on a tiny pedestal. As with the pedestal exercise we did previously, you can’t see behind you, or more than about ten feet (three meters) in front of you, or to either side.

Before you turn on the light above your Set pedestal, tell your subconscious mind (your Muse) that you’d like to see just the important things, and then ask yourself the following question: What three elements of this new place define the Set I’m about to see? Then turn on the light, and peek in.

I’ll throw together three new Dot Worlds to replace my Black Paint world so you can see what I mean.

SETS

- 1) Barren, rocky wilderness; 2) lightning-shattered tree; 3) bone-strewn field

- 1) Victorian blue and white mural wallpaper; 2) leaded glass windows; 3) carved wood floor

- 1) High school auditorium; 2) girls (only) in antique long dresses; 3) burned circle about five feet in diameter in the center of the auditorium stage.

In the third example, the girls in the auditorium are part of the set because the important detail about them is the way they’re dressed, which gives me a time reference. They’re not characters. They’re window dressing.

PROPS

Looking at the three lists above, I ask the following question: What object has made a critical change in the set?

My answers are presented in the same order as the Sets to which they belong.

- A sword, battered but of exquisite design, with a red stone in the pommel, with the blade burned blue around the edges

- A player piano, upright, oak, ornately carved, in the center of the carved wood floor.

- A silver box in the center of the burned circle, round, about ten inches in diameter, about ten inches high.

GIMMICKS

To get my gimmick, I look at each prop and ask, What is the prop doing, what has it done, or what could it do?

Notice that my answers are short, describing ONLY actions, not explaining them.

- The sword is glowing blue, but the glow is fading.

- The player piano just moved itself directly over a design carved on the floor, and without human intervention has just begun playing.

- The silver box appeared with the same flash of light and a puff of smoke into which the headmaster who’d been standing in that spot vanished.

My subconscious mind repeated things that were burned, and things that were centered. You may notice similar thematic repetitions when you’re doing this exercise. Sometimes, the repetition can become like a single piano key your Muse keeps banging on, as if to get your attention.

You can get to the bottom of whatever it is your Muse is trying to tell you by using a lined sheet of paper (or the lined Miscellaneous Exploration sheet that is the last sheet of your worksheet pack). Write out the question:

“What’s important to my story about _____?”

…with the blank space being replaced by whatever word, phrase, or concept your Muse has started nagging you about. Then write in whatever images, words, phrases, or connections your Muse gives you in response to your question. You may need extra sheets. Repetition usually indicates your subconscious mind has come up with something critical to your story. You’ll discover it’s worth taking the time to pursue this.

Your Turn

You need three details from a set, one prop and one gimmick to create a Quick Dot World.

Print off three Quick Dot World sheets (they’re in the LINE WORLD section of your worksheets), and build out Set, Prop, and Gimmick Dots for three new worlds. Come back here when you’re done, and I’ll show you how to use them to do the If Walls Could Talk… exercise.

If Walls Could Talk…

Human beings see faces in everything. If you stare at a patterned ceiling, you’ll see a face. If you look at the pile of balled-up socks waiting to be washed, you’ll see a face. The Moon—has a face.

:D

You look at the colon and letter “d” sideways, and you see a face.

We tend to personify both the animate and the inanimate—pets, toys, food.

Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield, made a bundle of money with his observation: “Cats are just little people with fur and fangs.” Lots of folks see them that way.

Or…

Take any inanimate object in your house. Here’s an example:

Felt Draft Blocker

The image above, indicated by the BIG arrow, is a felt draft-blocker. It sits on the rug shoved up against the door, and keeps cold, hot, or windy air outside from coming inside.

But what happens if you stick eyes on it?

Bob the Windworm

Well, then you have a family pet, something with a face, a personality, and a name.

In the If Walls Could Talk… exercise, you’re going to be interviewing inanimate objects. If your conscious mind is being a stick and refusing to let your Muse play this silly game, imagine whatever you’re interviewing with a big pair of googly eyes.

If you still can’t get there, you can buy Emergency Googly Eyes online by searching that name, (or you can find them in some stores—I think we bought ours at Target), and perform some quick, temporary surgery on whatever you need to talk to.

Because…well…you’re going to talk to bits of your Set and your Props. When doing this, you have to remember that, just like your characters (and real people), sometimes they’ll tell you the truth, sometimes they’ll lie to you, and sometimes they’ll keep secrets to themselves.

Don’t talk to props that are people. My Evil Ring Prop contains a person, so I can’t use it. If you talk to a human prop, you’re going to end up with character development (and another path to that freeway down the rabbit hole) rather than world development.

If you want to get the good gossip…?

…Ask the wall.

Your Turn

Have copies of the two Dot Worlds you’ll be using at your side. It can be difficult to remove the residue from your memory that wrong turn your story took. Having the worlds you’re working with in front of you will help you expunge whatever that removed world keeps trying to insert in your story.

You’re going to ask some of the following If Walls Could Talk questions to your interviewee from your first world, eliciting details about your other planned interviewee:

- How do you know about ______ in the other world?

- What have you seen ______ do?

- What have you done to ______ ?

- How are you and ______ connected?

- What is ______ trying to do to you (or for you)?

- What do you want from ______ ?

- What does ______ want from you?

- How long do you have to correct your problem with ______ ?

- What happens if you fail?

- What happens if you succeed?

- Are you in collusion with ______ ?

- If so, what’s your Evil Plan ______ ?

- Are you in alliance with ______ ?

- If so, what are you and ______ up against?

Pick question that interests you in advance, then go to your If Walls Could Talk worksheets.

Put your question list to one side with blanks filled in, set your timer for ten minutes

When your timer goes off, finish your current sentence and stop.

Now, ask your interviewee from your other Dot World questions. They can be the same questions, or different ones.

If you get get ten minutes of material from one interviewee, you’re done. There’s no set limit to the number of questions you can ask, but the time limit is firm. Don’t run over.

What I Got

I was thin on the ground with non-human props for my Evil Ring world. So I did a trip back to the pedestals, and got the following from Katie’s dorm room:

- Inline roller skates (for playing hockey on pavement or flooring)

- A hockey sweater rumored to belong to Katie’s hockey-playing rebel grandmother

- A puppet of a chicken, with wings into which human hands can go, as well as a fairly flexible mouth and face. (There’s one of these in my office, sitting on my guitar amp, staring at me right now.)

I chose my Victorian Parlor Dot World, the one with the fancy wallpaper and the player piano, as my second choice.

And decided to talk to the chicken and the piano.

This really is the sort of exercise you want to do in private, or only when around People Like You, because explaining that a chicken puppet is telling you the deepest, darkest secrets of a player piano that can move around on its own, or that the same piano is telling you just exactly why you need to watch out for that plushy brown chicken puppet, can end you up on the short list for a padded room.

If you are using this exercise to redirect your world development away from the unwelcome direction it was taking, remember that you have ditched the entire world you’d previously connected.

So in this world Katie, hockey, textbooks, and an evil ring all exist, but the paintings, the serial-killer artist, and the murdered woman who inhabited that ring, do not. I don’t know that the ring, in fact, has anything to do with murder. I know it induced Katie to think grim thoughts…but I no longer know why.

The Evil Ring has become only what I know about it from those seven paragraphs where Katie first discovered it.

If I like the direction I’m getting on this new Line World, I’ll have to come back and develop a new Dot for the ring.

Doing this exercise, I had:

WORLD ONE:

Katie was walking along the path back to her dorm, kicking the gravel in her frustration, when something went “clink.”

Dusk was falling, and she was tired, but that had been a heavy clink—an expensive clink. She had a ton of trigonometry waiting on the third floor, and a miserable hockey practice behind her, and the idea of something interesting between those two grim bookends sounded good.

She walked to where she’d thought she heard the metal sound, and crouched, and looked around. It was too dark to see clearly, but she had a little flashlight on her keychain. She pulled it out, flicked its light over the gravel, and something sparkled red at her.

Red. And gold. She picked it up. It was a ring, and looked as expensive as it had sounded. It was big and heavy enough to be a large man’s class ring, but first, it was sized to fit a woman’s finger, and second, it had nothing to do with higher education. The red stone formed the single, centered, enormous eye in a minutely detailed pure gold face distorted by pain and rage. She stared at that face, shining her flashlight over what was undeniably beautiful craftsmanship twisted to a hideous end.

When she looked at the eye,it seemed to look back at her. To make promises. She felt vengeance, she felt rage, she felt death and towering stacks of corpses and, and at the same time felt—racing beneath her skin—the hunger to bring pain and ruin, along with a triumphant thread of mad jubilation, berserk and bloody glee. With a single disgusted overhand movement, she flung the ring across the green and walked away.

In the history of the ring, she was the first person who’d touched it who hadn’t put it on.

The next person who touched it would.

And:

WORLD TWO:

- Victorian blue and white mural wallpaper, leaded glass windows, carved wood floor

- A player piano, upright, oak, ornately carved, in the center of the carved wood floor.

- The player piano just moved itself directly over a design carved on the floor, and without human intervention has just begun playing.

And my question to the chicken puppet was:

What do you want from the player piano?

When writing something like this, especially when you’re working against a timer, you’ll get the most information if you start simply by throwing together any images that you get of chicken puppets and player pianos.

Yes, I have intentionally made this weird, and crazy, and difficult for myself, because I want to show you that there is absolutely nothing your brain will refuse to connect for you if you just allow it to PLAY.

Onward.

Here’s what I got in ten minutes.

The Chicken Puppet Interview

chicken puppet and player piano, children like puppets, player pianos in houses of older folks, a parent, grandparent, crazy aunt…

And with the ring thrown in, travel, so the chicken puppet knows the player piano from Katie’s childhood, someplace where a collector lived, or worked.

At this point, I could see some connections and I asked the chicken my question:

What do you want from the player piano?

You should know I can’t stand that bastard. Pompous. Self-aggrandizing. He was a trick piano used in a theater, set up to be able to roll around the stage on his own when someone wound him up. He’s all full of gears and levers—one of a kind. And he never let me forget that there were plenty of me.

We did our act for the kids. I’d flap around, cluck and flutter to his music on top of his case, and the person operating me would make a big deal out of the story of the Dancing Chicken and the Piano Ghost, and all of a sudden the piano would roll across the parlor floor and leave me flapping after him while he started, stopped, seemed to be hunting for something.

I miss those days, when Katie was little, when I was special. But the piano wouldn’t care about them. Would never miss me. And when the aunt died, someone bought the player piano, and Katie took me, and…

I don’t hate him. I miss him. He was full of himself, but when he and I were together, the world was a wonderful place, full of music and laughter. I want to see him again. You know…I want to sit on his case when no one is around and think about what was.

I want children in my life again, and music. I want my friend back. And I wouldn’t even know where to start looking, but someone must know where all the aunt’s things went…

You can see at this point that Katie’s past had some great things in it. Everyone should have one aunt who is different, who is daring, who does not match the expectations of the world around her and who shows the kid looking at her that the world doesn’t have to be the grim gray box painted by school and parents and the vast weight of other people’s expectations.

I have discovered in this bit that Katie had such an aunt. So along with the hockey-playing Victorian great-great-whatever grandmother, this aunt—who I get the feeling never married—with her odd sense of humor around children and her strange taste in home decor, promises also a whiff of the forbidden.

Archeology? Secret societies? Dangerous friends from the past?

And again I’ll note, you do worldbuilding, you get characters. Most of them will be garbage…but I have fond memories of my own dangerously different aunt. She was never a tender flower—and I got some of my own edge from watching her, and seeing how she didn’t ever accept the pressures of conformity.

So Katie’s rebel aunt had a weird player piano and a funky chicken puppet. She is a keeper character; she gets to stay.

But now, I have to find out about the player piano’s view of all of this.

Remember googly eyes if talking to a player piano—or your particular prop—feels too weird.

I want something different from my interview with the player piano. I want more world, more backstory, a secret. I want the dirt on what that chicken has been up to…and again, this asking a piano about a chicken puppet is pure padded-walls territory, but neither the chicken nor the piano will have a voice in the actual story. And how you get the sharp and telling details that make your world stick in your readers’ minds can be (and probably should be) your little secret.

Here’s what I want to know from the piano.

What is the chicken hiding?

The Player Piano Interview

burlesque, bathtub gin, flappers and laughter and sins of commission, a chicken chasing laughing naked women around a room…

The chicken. Right. Tells a good story, does the chicken. Loves to make the children laugh, flaps around all innocent and brown.

But he got all the action, and I do mean all the action.

We were in the back room of a well-off gentleman’s home, behind a hidden panel that got added during Prohibition so the gentleman and his friends and their ladies could have a place to drink, and…

So picture if you will any number of rich blokes with their hands in the chicken’s wings, chasing women, making chicken noises at them, talking the women out of their dresses with funny chicken voices and the chicken wanting to cop a feel…

His name is Frank. And you know and I know that chickens are female and if he were male, he’d be a rooster…but he’s a chicken and his name is Frank, and he got very lucky with the ladies.

Time passed, and Frank and I were acquired by Elenore, and what the hell, but didn’t Frank get lucky with the ladies again.

Apparently if you’re a chicken puppet, doesn’t matter if your puppeteer is a dame or a gent. The dresses still just come right off.

Well, I hope Katie washed him when she inherited him.

That interview took me the full ten minutes on the timer, and I laughed while I was writing it, because until I asked the question, I had no idea that Frank had been holding out on me. Or that he had a name.

And I hadn’t imagined his secret…but by suggesting to my subconscious mind that he HAD a secret, my right brain happily (and quickly) came up with one.

Two. Because I didn’t know about Katie’s aunt, either.

So aside from having a chicken puppet who “conveniently” forgot the more interesting part of his past, a player piano who was on stage—almost certainly in a burlesque show—and an absolute lack of magic appearing anywhere in this world, what do I have?

Your Turn

Time for dissection. Use another Dot World Dissection Sheet to take apart your interview.

When you’re finished, go to the next page and I’ll show you what I came up with.

What I Got

My dissection sheet reveals that I now have the following:

- Props: Random children. “Children” (past tense and not to appear in the present story, are not characters but props) is used in the plural in the chicken interview, so from the juxtaposition of that with Katie’s name, I can assume that Katie was with other children. That the aunt was, perhaps, a daycare provider for the children of her siblings, friends, or neighbors, or that Elenore’s home was an after-school hangout for neighborhood kids.

- Gimmick: A past tie-in linked to Prohibition. (History contains “how things worked.”) Part of the story has ties back to Prohibition, the time period in US history where alcohol was made illegal, which in direct consequence created the perfect breeding ground for organized crime, gave rise to the FBI, gave power to J. Edgar Hoover, and permanently changed America, not for the better.

- Set: House. A cool Victorian renovated during Prohibition to create a safe space for illegal activities. This creates a second potential set, away from the college.

From what I’ve learned, I now face the following questions:

- Elenore, Katie’s aunt, acquired the chicken puppet and the player piano…but how, and why?

- Did she find them and buy them, or did she inherit them with the house?

- Does the house, now emptied and sold to strangers, still have its secret den of iniquity, its Prohibition-era hidden room…or rooms?

- What might be in the rooms?

- If the chicken puppet and the player piano have ties to that era, does the ring as well?

- And though the description of the ring is strongly suggestive of the presence of magic in Katie’s world, does the magic come from the ring?

- Or does it come from Katie’s ability to sense what it is?

- Or both?

I could go on. If you’re willing to dig, you can keep coming up with questions as long as you’re willing to look for them, and you can expand your questions to the point that you have enough material for a novel, a series, or a whole massive ring cycle of linked series.

Don’t, though. It’s much better to ask a few questions as you go, and get fresh questions frequently, than to lock yourself into a single direction by chasing down a thousand questions, pinning them to your subconscious, and expecting it to develop your story along just the line of questioning you pursued in the beginning.

Too many questions at once has the same story-stifling effect as laying out a street-by-street map of your world. When you’ve done it, you start to feel trapped by the weight of everything you’ve already done—and when you discover the better direction, the cooler story, the perfect starting point, you’ll be reluctant to use it because of the weight of everything that has come before.

A Demonstration Using Strange Connectors with Gimmicks

I’ve learned never to underestimate the importance of beta testing in making sure folks can actually use my courses to get the results they need.

In the beta test of this course, folks pointed out that while I’d demonstrated how Sets and Props and even Characters could connect across two Dot Worlds, I’d skipped any demonstrations anywhere of the following:

- How does your Gimmick in World 1 connect to your Gimmick in World 2?

Understanding the power of gimmicks in your fiction is essential, so here I am with something that I would have otherwise completely overlooked: using Strange Connectors on your gimmicks.

I’m going to do something funky here. I’m going to bring back the “glossy black paint” world, and connect it to my heretofore unused “angry farm girl” world using the two worlds’ gimmicks..

It’ll make an interesting experiment.

Let’s see what happens.

First, what is the gimmick in the my World #1—the “glossy black paint” world?

It’s this:

- The inclusion of fresh blood from a murder victim in paints or items prepared with specific alchemical treatments will imbue the soul of the victim in the painting or object so treated.

That’s a deeply unpleasant gimmick, and one that forces the story into a dark fantasy genre.

Now, what’s the gimmick in my “angry farm girl” world.

It’s this, and on the surface it seems pretty simple, and not very interesting.

- Storms bring lightning, and lightning affects what it touches.

So now in one world I have a daughter who is lying on ground in an open field when a storm is coming, and in another world, I have the ugly blood magic of  souls locked into objects.

I’ll do a Strange Connector between these two worlds, asking the question:

How does my gimmick in the “glossy black paint “world connect to the gimmick in my “angry farm girl” world?

Checking with my subconscious mind, which is coming in with strong opinions on this, I get:

- Paint World connects to Farm Girl world through the mechanism of blood mixed with the elemental ores in the earth (which are also used in paint), and the magic that traps a soul within these elements. The Farm Girl races to her father, fallen from a still-moving tractor and sliced beneath the disks of The Monster. She is still in an emotional state that connects her both to her murderous wish that he die rather than destroy her field, and to the wild emotions of horror and guilt of seeing him actually dying—and this cross of emotion with chemistry summons the magic that imbues her father’s soul in something that touches his blood.

I really don’t want this to be the disk harrow, because a girl’s battle with a haunted farm implement isn’t a story I wish to tell.

So I move to the next Stranger Connector, looking for something that will give me a better story.

I find it in the way my subconscious mind chose to present lightning to me:

- Storms bring lightning, and lightning affects what it touches.

Lightning affects what it touches.

When you’re connecting two Dot Worlds, most of the time you’ll be doing this by combining them into one world in which the same special physics and the same rules apply to both containers.

But when you’re writing within the realm of fantasy (and this includes both rigorously worked-out fantasy and magical realism, which is “hand-wave and because-I-said-so” fantasy), you have a second option.

This option is the two-world crossover, which is a form of pass-through...something we’ll go into in detail in Knowable Universes.

For now, I’m going to use the option of the pass-through to allow myself to maintain different rules in my Farm Girl and Paint Worlds.

So I ask myself this question.

How does this lightning affect what it touches?

And I decide that this lightning and this storm are the sort of storm, and the sort of lightning, that can rip open a connection between two alternate Earths—one in which the blood magic of paint and chemistry works, and one in which it does not.

In the instant that this lightning hits, it forms a connection between the two worlds, and the ground of the field becomes the ground of both fields.

The blood magic becomes real when the girl, in her emotional storm of guilt and anger and self-blame, and with her tiny flame of vengeance meted out, touches the dying body of her father, and makes the connection between her emotions, his blood, and the earth on which she kneels.

Her right hand touches the ground to steady herself, her left hand, wearing her confirmation ring, touches her father and his blood, the circuit is completed.

- Farm Girl world connects with Paint World through the mechanism of lightning, which kills the father, electrifies the earth, and tears a hole between two alternate universes, trapping girl, tractor, father’s corpse, and ring imbued with father’s spirit in the alternate universe.

Gimmicks matter. The wording of your gimmick will open opportunities for you to change worlds you don’t want to write in into worlds you do, if you closely question them.

In this case, the exercise has now given me a magical world I don’t want to write in either, so I won’t pursue this story any further. But it does demonstrate how you  can use Strange Connectors to connect your Dot Worlds by using your gimmicks, your “how things work” story physics.

It shows you how to change the nature of your worlds, if you care to do so.

You need to be sure your gimmick is appropriate to the genre in which you want to write, because more than anything else, your gimmicks will define your genre.

You need to make sure you’re very clear on what this gimmick permits and what it prohibits. The restrictions you place on your gimmicks are what make your story matter.

Finally...

Quick Concept Testing

The other thing this exercise demonstrates is the value of testing your concepts quickly, which is one of the major advantages of this system of worldbuilding. I didn’t spend months building a world that I then discovered I didn’t want to write in.

I spent a few minutes asking a couple of questions, and learned enough about the world to decide I wanted to move on.

There are enormous advantages in being able to make mistakes quickly, realize through testing that they are mistakes, and move past them to something that will work better.

So let’s move on to why Line worlds let you do this.

CHAPTER 7

The WHY of the Line World

Both sides of your brain are very good at spotting opposites and corollaries, at understanding how This is different from or complementary to That.

Your right brain is better at filling in the differences, making those leaps of intuition into what conflicts can be caused by splitting a place, a time, an object, or how something works into component parts, and filling in those parts with small, critical details.

Your left brain is better at tracking down the consequences of those details.

In the previous chapter, we built our details and put in a lot of good right-brain time.

Now you and I are going to go through a few steps to get a good, solid conflict.

Part 1: Pick the World You Like

I’m going to leap back to my college town with its streets lined with close-huddled homes. There’s something about that Prohibition-altered house that’s calling to me, something about the history of the place, a question about how something that happened back in the era of bathtub gin, rum-runners, and flappers can be having repercussions in the life of a young woman going to college on a hockey scholarship who found and threw away a remarkable ring. In this world, that ring is going to be a lot more subtle…and I find the idea of discovering its subtle power far more unnerving than I did looking at the over-the-top psycho-with-a-vendetta power of the ring in the previous world.

You can pick any world you’ve created for this clinic. You don’t have to use the most recent one. Read over all of them, pick the one that tickles the back of your mind, that makes you want to know more.

And if they all draw you (which is frequently my problem), then pick the one that scares you the most…the one you’re not sure you’re ready for yet.

When writing, always pursue what scares you. That’s where you’ll get your best work, where you push yourself hardest, where you’ll dare to take chances.

Your objectives for this section are going to be:

- To integrate your worldbuilding seamlessly into your stories

- To keep your readers hooked and reading every word, even when they’re reading description

- To learn how to prevent infodumping

I’m going to show you how to write active description—to use the elements of your world without resorting to infodumps.

You’ve read books where you found yourself skimming paragraphs or pages of books because the writers of them took time off from their stories to take us on the grand and deadly dull tour of their characters’ worlds.

I’ve done the infodump example already, so I’m not going to torture you with another one. But in The WHY of the Line World, I’m going to give you three tools that will, if you use them consistently, train your brain to never slip into infodump mode.

You’re going to meet Wallpaper, Blinkies, and Shin-bangers. And you’re going to come face to face with the primary concept of active description, which is this: If you take the time and effort to stick something in the story and call attention to it, you have to USE it.

This is the Prop concept—if you show the gun, you have to shoot the gun.

What I learned through long experimentation—a technique that helped me sell so many books, and that is responsible for so many people mentioning how they fell into my worlds because they feel so real—was to apply the “show the gun, shoot the gun” rule to description.

So here are three definitions you’re going to be using in your worldbuilding from now on, with examples of each.

TOOL ONE:

Wallpaper: Scenery that your characters may notice from a distance, which adds color and texture to your world, but which—on its own—does nothing that changes the story.

And here’s my quick example of plain wallpaper.

Black night, and the houses on Wickham Street huddled together, familiar and old, cold and shivering in their wooden bones. On the street, nothing moved, as if the bitter wind pouring down from the north had frozen the world.

A little plain wallpaper goes a long, long way. You need it in bits and pieces. I’ve just done two sentences above. If I pushed it to three, readers would start skimming, because nothing is happening, and if nothing is happening, the reader doesn’t care.

Even with the imagery of the houses cuddling up to each other against the cold, this is passive description.

To keep readers going, you have to add something that changes. Thing is, if you do it right, it can still be description. This is where blinkies come in.

TOOL TWO:

Blinkies: Things that move, blink, wriggle, or otherwise draw the reader’s attention, showing when they do just a little piece of how the world works. The best blinkies hint at conflict to come.

What I need to prevent more than two sentences of description from clogging my reader’s arteries is action within the description: description that IS action. So here’s a blinkie as the third line.

Minutes ahead of the coming blizzard, a night rose bloomed, shooting into the air silent as a hunter, blazing brilliant red against low, scudding clouds, blood-bathing snow and houses and ice-slicked street in its hard light, glaring down in unblinking fury until sudden blackness claimed it.

One sentence describes the blinkie. It’s still part of the wallpaper—still not a character, still not conflict. But it is change.

It shows the reader something that moves, that alters his perception of the world I’m showing him. He doesn’t know what a night rose is yet—the houses could be in an ancient village, a little town, or a big city, the weather lets us know we’re in the northern hemisphere (in the southern hemisphere, the cold would come up from the south), and the people are in an area where trees are—or were, back when the houses were new—common enough to be a regular building material.

But we could be on any planet, in any sort of universe, and into that uncertainty, the night rose brings a question mark. It could be a magical item casting a spell. It could be a flare summoning invading troops. It could be a creature moving into the area, preparing to plague the villagers. It could be some sort of high-tech silent bomb spreading poison or genetically engineered viruses into the air.

Because of the words I used to describe its effect on its surroundings and those surroundings in relationship to it, though, you aren’t likely to think a night rose is something anyone will be happy about. Silent as a hunter. Blood-bathing. Glaring down. Unblinking fury.

One good blinkie in your wallpaper can set your stage for your story far better than a Prologue, an expository dump, or the history of your characters or your villages or your world.

TOOL THREE:

Now I’m going to toss in a shin-banger to wrap up this tiny scene.

Shin-Bangers: Elements that are stationary and can be moved over, around, or through by your characters, and that your characters can interact with, but that cannot interact with your characters. Shin-bangers simply are. They provide conflict by obstacle.

To use a shin-banger, you have to have a character. So I’m going to introduce one now, and end the scene with the shin-banger and its effect. When you get ready to write yours, make sure you introduce someone other than your main character. That’s just for this exercise, because we’re going to work with your main character and the person in your new scene in the next section of this chapter

Emmi Hanson, breathing air that froze her from the inside out, hurrying against the storm smell of imminent snowfall, barely kept her balance as she skidded and slid down a sidewalk salt had only cleared in patches, her head full of worries and her stomach knotted with a fear she could not explain or describe. That long blast of red light had sent her pulse racing, but she’d already been terrified...which was why she’d come home.

Her house was three down, and she wished she could have parked closer. Something was wrong. Something she couldn’t see and couldn’t name was after her.

She picked up her pace, looking at the light pouring warm and golden from her family’s living room window. She should have told them she was coming. They should have known to look for her.

Hurrying, she didn’t see the black ice that threw her to the ground. One instant she was almost home—the next, lying stunned with her chin, lip and cheek cut, and the palms of her hands scraped raw and bloody, while the ruby eye in her gold ring glowed with the same mad light that had abandoned the sky.

My shin-banger sentence is short and simple.

Hurrying, she didn’t see the black ice that threw her to the ground.

You can use a light hand with a shin-banger. If you’re too heavy with the description of the shin-banger or its effect, offer too much detail, too much screaming and falling, fumbling with the door, tripping over that root in the forest on the run, you’re going to skid from suspension of disbelief into an I Love Lucy sitcom episode.

If you’re looking for slapstick comedy, on the other hand, the basset hound with a knack for sleeping precisely where people will trip over him can become both a recurring element and a fine shin-banger that can take trouble where you need it.

The protest Dogs can interact with characters! does not apply to sleeping dogs, sleeping cats, or anything else that could move but isn’t at the moment. The shin-banger’s purpose in your scene is to provide conflict by obstacle, and anything that isn’t moving and won’t move until it has served its purpose can be a shin-banger. Having the dog raise an eyebrow and sigh (but refuse to move, in pure Basset hound fashion) when your poor-but-good-hearted heroine trips over him and breaks the priceless Ming vase, does not count as interaction, because it does not connect with the character or impede the conflict. When he’s done being a shin-banger, of course, your dog can return to being a dog.

Your Turn

All right. With definitions, demo, and explanations in place, it’s time for you to do some active description for your world. So break out your Wallpaper, Blinkie, Shin-Banger worksheets and follow the directions. Then go to the next page for the second part of this exercise.

Part 2: Divide Your World for Conflict

With a scene now written in your new world, and the first scene done from the other world, you’re now set up to create some great conflict.

This process works with sets, props, and gimmicks, and at this point, between your two scenes you should have two sets, and several props and gimmicks.

You’ve worked on digging out critical details of your world by dissection.

You’re going to expand on that technique with the following little diagram.

The Criticals Dot: What three points matter?

It looks a bit like a medieval caltrop, or like a weapon you could throw in an 8-bit video game.

It is a Criticals Dot.

Why Criticals Dot, not Critical Dot? Because it supports—and requires—three separate and unique critical elements, or criticals. The plural of Criticals Dot is Criticals Dots. A critical Dot, on the other hand, is redundant. If it’s a Dot, it’s critical. If it’s not critical, it’s not a Dot.

A Criticals Dot is a multipurpose tool, but the way we’re going to use it now, it will help you locate (or create) the worldbuilding details that will give you the best conflict—because if you have conflict in your worldbuilding, and not just in your characters, you will not stall out when you hit doldrums in your story. Frankly, you’re much less likely to hit doldrums at all.

I’m going to show you how to fill out your dots, and right now, I’m going to start with the Criticals Dot for the scene I just finished.

And because I need the critical elements on Set, Props, and Gimmick, and I prefer to figure them out in this order, I’ll demo the Wickham Street set.

On the top spike of the Criticals Dot, I pull directly from my scene, with A street of old wooden houses built close together.

But the scene itself, while it gave me details, did not give me a lot of details I want to emphasize in the story. The sidewalk, the street name—no. These are not essentials.

A story essential is a detail around which you will build your whole story.

The detail of the houses being built close together is one that will matter. Why?

Neighbors who live close together—close enough together that they can hear the folks in the next dwelling over—take one of two approaches to dealing with such people crammed into such close quarters: they either focus on making the people around them invisible, or they live in each other’s pockets. I’m from small-town Ohio. My people were pocket people.

So the closeness of the houses is likely to matter to Emmi and her family and her family’s neighbors in the present, and it was likely to have mattered back in the Roaring Twenties, when the house Emmi lives in was operating a secret speakeasy out of its back rooms (and probably some portion of the basement).

But I had to dig into my interviews to come up with the other two details for the set.

Victorian, so usually of good size was my second essential. This might seem trivial. However, my father’s grandparents lived in one of these Victorians, and I remember vividly from my childhood both how big the thing was inside, and how many little rooms and hallways and staircases and ways in and out it had. A clever builder could have tucked away a few of those little rooms, along with a private staircase into the cellar, and only someone with strong suspicions and a tape measure would have realized part of the house had gone missing.

Of course, living in each other’s pockets, and being able to hear the noise next door, the neighbors would catch on.

And finally, in Criticals Dotting my Wickham Street neighborhood set, At least one [house] renovated during Prohibition.

I’ve already discussed the renovation, but the three-word phrase At least one, set off from the rest of that note, offers me some interesting possibilities to pursue.

This is the sort of little off-hand mention your subconscious mind will throw at you—and you have to know to look for it when it shows up. I call these Muse Bombs. What you can do with them if you spot them is amazing.

You spot that little phrase—at least one—and you realize your subconscious mind decided this was worth a mention. So now you need to ask Why?

Why does it matter that another house on the street might have been renovated during Prohibition. Two speakeasies would be dull. So what else might have changed during that time period?

In the years in the US between 1920, when Prohibition became law, and 1933, when Prohibition was repealed, other quirky events were occurring. In the 1920’s, the Spiritualism movement broke off into the Syncretists—individual practitioners of spiritualist practices such as rapping, mediumism, and other methods of attempting to communicate with the dead; the Survivalists—whose approach to the survival of the spirit after death have been scientific, with dedicated attempts to prove the presence of spirits through recording, photography, measurement of changes in ambient temperature in rooms, and so on; and, the Spiritualist church—with a complete hierarchy, dogma, and formal training for practitioners and believers.

This is something that pinged in the back of my mind as I asked the question why, and I double-checked dates to be sure.

And this is where reading a lot outside your genre will come in handy for you. The more weird facts and historical references you have tucked away where your subconscious mind can get at them, the more fun you’ll have digging out your Muse Bombs and setting them off in your story.

Having a place where folks were regularly trying to summon the dead, after all, gives me another way the ring can be connected to the story.

I haven’t decided yet how this detail will connect. I can think of a handful of excellent options right away, but I want to let them perk for a while.

Now, after all, it’s time for you to put together some Criticals Dots. And to use the line in between them to create more innate conflict in your world.

On the Divide Your World For Conflict worksheet, you’ll see three dots on each side of the line.

The easy way to do this is to use the first Criticals Dot in each column for Set, the second one for Prop, and the third for Gimmick.

To keep things limited and relevant, I’m going to do the first set around Katie’s dorm room, and the second around Emmi’s family home, which Katie knew as a child.

I’ll have Katie’s dorm on the right, Emmi’s room in her family home on the left, and follow my own instructions for Set, Prop, and Gimmick. (The sheet isn’t labeled, because this way you can use it for any sort of Dot-and-Line work you need to do.)

Your Turn

It’s time to find the critical elements in the active worldbuilding you’ve just finished, and give yourself some good, solid questions around which you can develop your world and its story. Print off and fill out a Divide Your World For Conflict worksheet. When you have all three points on each Dot filled out, come back and I’ll walk you through what I got.

What I Got

Katie’s dorm: Set

- Old fashioned solid oak door with a key lock and a large sliding inside lock.

- Two beds, one unoccupied, and two desks, one unused

- Very old single-pane rolled glass windows which, when looked out of, make the world look like a runny watercolor painting

Emmi’s room: Set

- Hidden door inside the closet in Emmi’s bedroom (which used to be a parlor) that leads to the speakeasy

- Wood floor with creaky floor boards—several of them pull up to reveal secret storage.

- Old Victorian door with glass doorknob and keyhole lock that has been filled with chewing gum—preventing anyone from peeking into the room through the lock, but making the lock unusable. Its replacement is a rubber wedge that can be kicked into place to keep the door closed

Katie’s dorm: Prop

- A new goalie stick with a roll of tape on the side for taping the grip and the blade: she has not yet begun taping

- A pair of well-worn goalie skates, her own personal equipment, well cared for, with new laces and freshly sharpened blades

- The chicken puppet, posed on her desk, sitting upright with wings folded across his stomach, holding a little sign that says, “Logic is the cornerstone of life.”

Emmi’s room: Prop

- A book titled Magickal Implements, Artifacts, and Oddities

- A book titled The High Art of Magical Summoning

- A little crystal-tipped wand with a sterling silver body and a rosewood grip, newly purchased from a pagan shop near the college campus, and folded under it on her dresser, instructions on parchment on how to use the wand

Katie’s dorm: Gimmick

- Reason and logic rule

- Technology, athleticism, and science are primary ideals

- There are no secrets. What is visible is almost all there is (though the distortion of the view through the glass creates disturbing possibilities), and safety is simple, direct, and practiced

Emmi’s room: Gimmick

- Mysticism and magic rule

- The supernatural is the primary ideal

- Nothing is exactly what it appears, nothing works as expected, and fear—of discovery, but also of the results of actions—has a foothold in every corner

My results, worked so I could see how they conflicted with each other, develop the settings…but also demonstrate who each young woman is. The opposing interests and philosophies revealed by the contents of the two rooms draw a clear line dividing the characters from each other.

If these two are friends, it will not be because of any common ground they share personally—they might have known each other as children, but are likely to find, even without the wildcard element of Emmi’s ring, that their fond memories don’t translate into any sort of present compatibility.

In worldbuilding for fiction (as opposed to worldbuilding for gaming, or just for fun) the world exists to develop the characters and the story.

With Dot Worlds and Line Worlds behind us, it’s time to move on to the Tube of Toothpaste.

CHAPTER 8

World #3: The Tube of Toothpaste World and Its WHY

Setting SANE Limits to Create Better Fiction

Simple. Active. Necessary. Elements.

You need to keep them tightly in check, and keep them few in number. Your objective is to be herding sheep through a corral with a couple trained dogs to keep them moving, NOT herding cats across a wide open field all by your lonesome.

Okay…let me give that metaphor a real-world connection for you.

Jim Baen, my first publisher, once explained to me in rejecting a proposal I put together with another writer that if anything can happen, nothing matters.

Consider: You are attacked by a villain, and though you were caught alone, unarmed, and off guard, you pull a gun you didn’t have a minute earlier out of your pocket and shoot him.

He heals himself instantly of the gunshot wound, and attacks you with a laser rifle that he created out of air, slicing you in half…but you pull yourself back together and blow him up with a hand-held mini-nuke.

He is obliterated…for a second, after which he reappears, unchanged, unharmed, and unstopped.

The two of you then toss buildings, cities, galaxies, universes, and singularities at each other, and in the end stop, simply because nothing you can do can affect each other.

There is no story here. There is fiction, but not the sort of fiction anyone would pay to read.

This is fiction without limitations. Anything can happen. It is as entertaining as two six-year-old children arguing about whose dad can beat the other’s, where each father is apparently a combination of Superman and God.

- Limits are as useful (and helpful) in fiction as they are in real life.

- Limits in time give you life and death.

- Limits in physics give you bullets that cannot be evaded and mountains that cannot be moved.

- Limits in knowledge give you characters who have to learn what they’re up against, and require them to figure out how to avoid, prevent, or survive the disasters they face.

- Limits create meaning. With limited time, with limited knowledge, you and your characters are forced to make choices. Your life cannot be about everything, and neither can theirs. So you, and they, must decide which battles to fight, and which to ignore; which people to love, which to hate, and which to ignore; which dreams to fight for…and which to let slip away.

Finity has a price.

To make that price meaningful in your world, you build in limits to everything, and you build small. Even if you’re building an infinite universe, you STILL build small. Details of the infinite, not the unattainable whole.

Which brings us here.

The Tube of Toothpaste World: Extra detail for Just This Moment is needed here.

That Which Is Ordinary Need Not Be Mentioned

You’re going to look at the limits of your world. First, set out its boundaries. I’ll show you what I mean.

The boundaries of my story could be the state of Ohio—but that would leave far too much room for unnecessary worldbuilding. I must ask myself, How much of Ohio am I actually using? Two old houses on one street in one imaginary town, and a dorm, a green, and certainly a few other pieces of a college on the outskirts of the same town.

For this story, which will be short—and which I’ll do as a one-off—not a series, I have no need to engage in extensive worldbuilding. Though you could write an entire series of novels set in the same small handful of locations, this world doesn’t speak to me passionately, so I won’t even consider it.

Ah-ha! you shout. Then there is a time when you do extensive worldbuilding!

To which I reply, In limited circumstances, which we have not yet reached, and when you do it SANEly, yes.

But passion for a world does not beget three months of drawing maps and six months of building all the languages and costumes for the movie version of the as-yet-unwritten story.

For the world of my Cadence Drake novels—a world which sank its talons into my soul when I wrote the first book an age ago, and which just dug in deeper with the second novel—I have both insane passion AND an infinite universe.

Nevertheless, Cady’s novels do not have the infinite boundaries you might expect.

My boundaries are Cady’s ship, (well, ships—she’s been running through them like they were free the past couple books), which I explore in moderate detail; and individual locations on worlds that have differing styles of government, differing philosophies, differing religions, and consequently, different ways of dealing with problems, including problem people, of whom Cady is frequently one.

In the first novel I created an unfortunate worldbuilding leak in the form of a physics gimmick.

A worldbuilding leak is a place where you break the rules of SANE worldbuilding, and include a justification for infinite worldbuilding, while simultaneously removing all meaning.

In my case, I used theoretical physics to posit reachable infinite parallel universes. This means that I posited that anything could happen.

If anything can happen, nothing matters.

When I wrote the first book, about fourteen years before I started the second, I did not recognize the worldbuilding leak.

However…fourteen years later, I hit that leak at about a hundred miles an hour while writing what was to be the second book of my ten-book series, and it broke my plot. This time, because I have gotten better at this over the years, I saw how it broke my plot. I plugged the first half of the hole—the WHAT portion, by writing a completely new second book is the series—Warpaint—and outlining a third book, tentatively titled The Wishbone Conspiracy, to fix the second half of that plot hole break.

After which, my planned Book Two will become Book Four.

With my Cadence Drake/Settled Space novels, we’re talking vast, sweeping panoramas, faster-than light-travel, cultures and civilizations and history and the future wide open and bright with possibility. And danger. Yet the actual amount of physical terrain I have explored in the two completed Cadence Drake novels wouldn’t cover a single street in New York City. Because of the way I did it, the reader gets the feeling of the vast reaches of space in the books.

I am not creating a world. I am creating the illusion of a world, and letting the reader carry the heavy lifting.

Now you’re going to do that.

Your Turn

You’re going to list each location you’ve used, and each location you’ve mentioned in one of the worlds you’ve just created with this course, and from one to three specific details about each.

Print off and fill out your Set Limits to Create Meaning sheets to understand the boundaries of the world you’re writing right now.

One rule.

If it’s not in your story—meaning your existing scenes—it’s not in your world.

What I Got

Don’t be surprised by how little there is. I’ve done a lot of trial and error stuff to get to this point—the best story you can write, created from the best world you’re capable of creating, does not often come from the first line you throw down on paper.

So I have a lot of elements and directions I’ve tossed as not being what I want to pursue right now.

On my Locations Used sheet, I’m left with:

College green

- gravel path

- ring

Wickham Street

- old wooden houses

- night rose

- sidewalk

For Locations Mentioned, I got:

Emmi’s house

- golden light from window

Why is there so little actual world to my world? Because this is what active description does. It prevents you from boring the curly green toenails off your readers. Your characters act, your story progresses, and because you call in your readers as partners and allow them to fill in the parts of your world you only allude to, they come away with a story they’ll remember…because they created part of it, and that made it live for them.

If you have the whole thing pinned down like a prize collection of dead butterflies, with everything in its place and neatly labeled, the only people who will love what you’ve done will be other dead-butterfly collectors.

But.

You want more world in your story, and I want more world in mine. How do you do that?

You write more story, you dissect more bits of your world, you pull out what’s important, you keep that small and tight, and you know what you want to accomplish with each bit of the world you want to use.

You limit the number of world elements in any scene, but to the ones you have in there, you give your full attention.

Which brings us back to the title of this Section:

That Which Is Ordinary Need Not Be Mentioned.

Your tube of worldbuilding toothpaste includes ONLY the extraordinary.

But in terms of essential details and Criticals Dots, your definition of “ordinary” is nothing like a non-writer’s definition of “ordinary.”

You get to treat the most astonishing things as “of course that’s how it works”—because when you do, you make your world real and livable to your reader.

In Episode IV: A New Hope, the first Star Wars movie, George Lucas had a moment of utter brilliance in his Cantina Scene.

Here’s the scene: Two androids walk into a cantina in Mos Eisley, where we find thirty or forty different species of sapient alien bipeds drinking various forms of intoxicating beverages, while a weird alien band plays, and where in a minute one alien is going to get his arm slashed off with an energy blade, and another is going to be shot dead by an awesome laser pistol and no one is going to be even remotely disturbed.

And the line from the bartender is…anyone?

“Hey! We don’t serve their kind here.” Nodding to the androids.

This has the brilliantly shocking effect of making everything in the bar NORMAL. Except the robots, of course, who become extraordinary by their exclusion from a crowd that an instant before seemed to include nothing but the extraordinary.

This gives your reader a tiny thrill of recognition. Here is a limit, a place where the rules by which the world operates are defined. Things that breathe (anything, not just oxygen, because there’s one guy in the cantina with a helmet on and visible green gas in the helmet, so you know he isn’t breathing oxygen) are welcome in this particular bar in the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is Mos Eisley. They are the norm. Non-breathing dudes made of metal, though they are certainly thinking creatures, are not.

To you, the writer, the ordinary is what the vast majority of people of your world see every day.

One more time, because this matters.

The “ordinary” is what the people of your world see every day.

You don’t get to gosh-and-gee-whiz your way through writing all the cool stuff you create for your world, remarking on every spiffy detail and showing off every toy.

Instead, you are your world’s Official Old Geezer. No matter how many cool things are going on in your world, you have Seen It All, Done It All, Ain’t Nothing New Under The Sun.

When something shocks you, THAT’s extraordinary.

Let me knock out a quick example for you:

Traffic was hell. The A-80 was clogged three layers deep coming and going, and cops were on permanent hover, doing blood-and-scans on every passenger. Third time in a week.

I was going to be beyond late to the office, and I was sitting there waiting for the car to move forward, and trying to build my excuse for why I hadn’t left an hour early, when on the ground far below, on the remainder of a road that couldn’t have been used in over fifty years, I saw a tiny figure in an independent mobile vehicle driving carefully across the cracked and broken pavement.

What’s normal in this world? Bad traffic, flying cars (but not ones individual drivers control), cops who can check the DNA, retinal scans, blood samples, and who knows what else of every occupant in every vehicle without a warrant or showing just cause.

What is shocking?

Some dude far below in a beat-up jalopy, driving along what remains of an old-fashioned ground-bound street.

If you play your role as Official Old Geezer, you will give your readers credit for being smart enough to figure out what’s going on without you putting rings in their noses and dragging them behind you…and you will also easily and quickly realize what is genuinely extraordinary in your world, versus what is incredibly cool but ordinary.

That which is ordinary need not be mentioned.

I never said a word about the flying cars. Never said a word about the fact that they were programmed or that they had no drivers. I, the Old Geezer, assumed you already knew that, because you and I both live in this world with flying cars we can ride in but can’t drive.

As the Geezer, I refer to the cops checking passengers…because there are no drivers. And we know the vehicles are controlled elsewhere because…?

Because the voice of the passenger speaking to us (who sees his world through my Old Geezer eyes) is riveted by seeing someone far below in an independent mobile vehicle, driving it.

To him, this is going to be both a shock, and is going to change his life…because he’s going to tell the cops he saw it. And the cops are going to arrest him.

No, I didn’t have a story planned. I didn’t have anything planned, but I built sentence by sentence, using active description, and the story revealed itself in the action.

The Dot World, the Line World, and the Toothpaste World will become second nature to you. You will absorb the techniques with practice, until you automatically write actively, rather than passively. And you will eventually only use the worksheets when you’re debugging something in your story that broke.

For now, though, onward.

What is extraordinary in this world?

- An old car moving across an abandoned road far below (blinkie)

- Everything else is just wallpaper

That which is ordinary need not be mentioned.

This is the rule that keeps your worldbuilding tight and small, that keeps your worlds feeling lived in, that puts your readers into this place you have created with your mind with you and allows them to be part of the story. You trust them to be able to live in your world as residents, not as tourists.

This is a big deal. If you do this, (and tell a good story,) you create immersion.

Immersion is when your reader is so deeply connected to your world that he stays up all night reading; misses his bus stop because he’s living inside your world, not his; cannot quit until he has turned your last page.

Of all the letters and emails you receive, or posts written on your blog, these and the ones from readers who tell you you’ve changed their life will be the ones you store in your memory and print off to save in your filing cabinet—the ones that start with, “[Title] kept me awake all night, and I was supposed to be up for work by six, but I didn’t finish the book until seven and got to work late, and WOW!”

You connected with that reader, mind to mind. You created a world you loved and he lived in. You gave him an experience he cherished.

This is not the payoff for the long hours of work: creating your world, filling it with story, and following that story to its wonderful ending is the payoff for the work.

But this is the moment when you discover that you are not alone in this place you loved and made, not the only living occupant of your world. And that is a beautiful thing. Now you’re going to do it.

Your Turn

It’s time for you to adopt the role of your world’s Old Geezer.

Get out your background for the world you’ve decided to use, and looking at your interviews and other writing, decide which parts of what you have created are extraordinary from the Old Geezer point of view.

Use a LINE WORLD—Quick Dot World sheet to build a new setting (I’m going to write a scene set in Emmi’s bedroom, just to give you an idea of what you’re working towards) and in this scene, use your Geezer eyes and your extraordinary details to let your reader build the rest of your world, while you focus on getting in just the critical bits.

Before you read my example, be sure to write your new scene out.

Use a ten-minute timer if you have one, and don’t run more than twenty minutes total. Your objective here is to allow “ordinary in your world”—no matter how strange—to happen without waving your arms and shouting, “Gosh! Look at that!”

Point to what is extraordinary in your world, and let your reader draw his own conclusions.

What I Got

This is a follow-up to the scene where Emmi hit the icy pavement in my Ohio Town And Campus world.

She woke in aching bits, rising through the confusion of “What happened?” to “Where am I?” trailing fragments of a dream that had felt more real than life while she was in it, to face the final question: “Who am I?”

She opened her eyes. Her hands hurt, her face hurt, and the room she was in seemed both to belong to her, and to someone else. There were no lights on. She thought, I need a match, or a candle, and rejected that with the notion that there would be a switch in the room she could flip. Light would come at the touch of a fingertip.

She stood, shaking. Her knees throbbed, the skin on her hands was torn. And the floor felt wrong in two different ways. One part of her mind insisted that the carpet was far too thick and springy, the other that there should be nothing but polished oak beneath her feet.

Feeling through the dark, bumping into furniture neither half of her mind was ready for, she found a door in the right place (wrong place) and turned on the light, and part of her shivered with “Where am I?”

The other half trembled with “When am I?”

That was ten minutes. I cleaned up the typos I found, but this is otherwise unchanged. And all I have to say is, my subconscious mind decided to have its fun with me. If you haven’t caught on yet, two things are going on here. One, Emmi is feeling the effects of the ring she’s wearing, and some of the person who had once worn it has become strong enough to make herself known both in dreams and in connecting with Emmi directly.

The other thing that’s going on, though, is that Emmi isn’t in her room.

She’s in the other person’s room. Two houses on the same street, remember? And my subconscious mind decided to spring this on me right after the little internal argument on how to turn on a light.

I don’t know how she got in there, where the current occupants are, or how the ring spirit dragged her to its old house instead of hers.

But my subconscious mind is a big believer in the extraordinary—and it decided, while I was futzing around with the remains of a nightmare and the concept of electricity vs. gas, that extraordinary would be waking up in another house entirely.

So. You not only got to watch me get dragged sideways by my Muse, but you also have a scene you can dissect, after you have dissected your own, for Dots, Lines, and the rules and limitations of what is extraordinary imposed by the Toothpaste World.

Take the time to dissect your own scene carefully. Dissecting mine is optional.

Once you’re done, we’re going to divert briefly to a Rant, in which I demonstrate the worldbuilding sin of Different To Be Different, and why you don’t do that.

Because you have just completed the three processes of Essential Worldbuilding.

What remains after this?

The three kinds of universes and how they affect your three steps in building SANE worlds. Then, either a walkthrough of or a dive into the depths of a much more comprehensive version of worldbuilding—the clean, controlled version of the stuff you thought worldbuilding was before you discovered how simple and useful it truly is.

Geek-Deep Worldbuilding.

Which is essential for some sorts of projects and some types of stories.

But it also offers some fun and useful techniques any fiction writer can use…and done my way, it won’t eat your life or your writing time.

So take a break, read the rant, and then we’ll get back to work.

CHAPTER 9

A Rant: Being Different to Be Different

There are a helluva lot of people on this planet who not only know how things work, but who also know WHY things work—and among these people are many who read books. This is frequently how many of them learned how things work. And why.

If you’ve done some worldbuilding and veered wildly from the way things are in the real world, but you have created a solid reason why, people who know how things work will accept what you’ve created...or they at least will not rip you to shreds and feed you to the hyenas.

If, on the other hand, you create something that is different just to be different, and you have no good reason why, you are going to be shredded, scathed, mocked, and scorned. As I am about to demonstrate—first with a real-world example of a “gimmick” DTBD (Different To Be Different), and then with a big, public, space opera “prop” DTBD—this is how hyenas get fat.

Real World: Ruby Tuesday Santa Fe Chicken Salad

The Santa Fe Chicken Salad is popular where I live. This is an entree salad containing ingredients found in Southwestern cooking—some variant of a spicy tomato-based sauce, frequently with jalapeños; guacamole (an avocado-based topping); corn, black beans, and sometimes sour cream; roasted chicken and a lettuce or spinach base (because it’s a salad); and some sort of corn tortilla chips for crunch.

Several restaurants around here serve variations on that salad, and because I like that combination of ingredients, if a restaurant serves it, that’s what I’m likely to order. So we went to Ruby Tuesday for a nice evening out.

And I ordered their Santa Fe Chicken Salad, and discovered DTBD all over my food.

My salad came with wonton strips instead of corn chips. Wontons are Chinese food, and I love Chinese food, but wontons are by no stretch of the imagination Southwestern fare.

Ruby Tuesday decided that their version of the Santa Fe Chicken Salad needed to be different than anyone else’s, and hired a guy to make it different. “Different” became more important than “right.” There was no “reason why” behind the substitution of wonton strips for corn chips or tortilla strips that fit within the rules established by “flavors indigenous to the Southwest.”

And in cases of worldbuilding—of which this is one—there are things that fit and things that don’t, things that are right, and things that are wrong.

The wonton strips were wrong. Their flavor was off. The Ruby Tuesday salad was like eating a dish of leftovers created by someone who’d had bits and pieces of two meals from different cultures, and who’d thrown them together not caring whether the tastes complemented each other or not. The menu designer’s creative license that ignored the rules of Southwestern cooking made for a lousy salad.

So that’s DTBD in the real world. Now, DTBD in fiction.

Fiction: Battlestar Galactica’s Paper

Battlestar Galactica (BG) was a badly written, badly acted, badly worldbuilt 1970’s television series that had an excellent and overall well-thought-out remake in the early 2000’s.

But the remake series carried over some of the first series’ awful worldbuilding, and the example of DTBD that drove me craziest was something tiny.

Every piece of paper in the BG universe was an octagon. Every item that interacted with paper in the BG universe was ALSO an octagon. Not an equilateral octagon, mind you, but a rectangle with the corners clipped off. Reports, folders, clipboards, photographs, books...if it was paper or held paper, by God, someone had gone through and faithfully clipped the corners.

Now. Consider how paper is made in an industrial society, which the Battlestar Galactica universe most assuredly is.

Wood, fibers, clays, and other ingredients are ground finely and mixed with water or other fluids to create a slurry, which is poured onto a conveyor-belt-type screen, dried while being rolled and smoothed, stored in massive rolls, and then mechanically cut in straight lines to form rectangles or squares in commercial sizes.

Because machines do the cutting, straight lines matter. Because there is no purpose served in gumming up the works by creating massive amounts of waste paper, rectangles and squares are the shapes created. At most four cuts create a rectangular sheet of paper, and the process leaves no waste beyond any mill ends that are left over after the last sheets in a roll are cut.

You’ll need EIGHT cuts to clip the corners off, will require special machinery that cuts at a 45 ̊ angle but that cannot be run by continuous roller because the cuts would not be contiguous from sheet to sheet (Battlestar Galactica sheets not being equilateral octagons), and in your process you will create massive, pointless waste to be disposed of at the end of manufacture (all those little triangles).

So why would an entire civilization have octagonal paper?

It wouldn’t—not because of how things work in that world—but simply because of how things work. There is no universe in which clipping the corners off of every sheet of paper would not create a waste disposal issue or require extra machinery, and none in which it would serve some practical purpose. If an octagon will fit on a shelf, a rectangle will, too, and won’t wobble. If you create octagon-bottomed shelves, you’re simply adding to the stupidity.

If you have changed an element of your world simply because you wanted to make it strange, find out WHY we do it the way we do in our world before you get too attached. Don’t be stupidly Different to Be Different. If you have a better reason for doing it your way, people like me won’t mock you.

Hell, even if you’ve just gone to the trouble to figure out and make clear WHY they do it, you’ll get it past those folks who are willing to suspend disbelief over real-world details in favor of “their reason makes sense in their context.”

However, if you’re milling octagonal paper, or the equivalent, watch out.

(Excerpted from How to Revise Your Novel © 2010, by Holly Lisle, all rights reserved)

BUILDING UNIVERSES

CHAPTER 10

What’s A Fiction Universe?

Fiction Universe: Everything that can appear in your story.

As we discussed in The Toothpaste World, you’ll spend time figuring out what cannot be in your world. These limitations establish the rules and boundaries—they define what is possible in your story or series of stories and what is not.

When you define your universe, you must do so knowingly, and you must fight with everything in you to keep the boundaries of your universe tight, because if you breach them even once (as I accidentally did in Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood, before I discovered and began correcting my error) you make it impossible for the events in your story to matter.

If something outside the rules of your universe is allowed through the borders of the rules you have established, then anything could potentially come through. And if anything can happen?

Right. Nothing matters.

In the next three chapters, we’re going to build three different universes: A Container Universe, a Knowable Universe, and an Infinite Universe.

You’ll learn how to establish the specific rules for each of these universes, how to maintain them, how to keep your stories meaningful, how to avoid cheating yourself, your characters, and your readers, and mostly, how to do all of this while still having fun and telling a great story.

Just make sure the definition is clear in your head: Your fiction universe is everything that can appear in your story.

CHAPTER 11

Container Universes

How Low Can You Go?

There’s a party game called Limbo, where two people hold opposite ends of a long dowel, and everyone else has to bend backward while walking under the stick, after which the folks holding the stick lower it a bit, and everyone goes under again.

If you land on your rear end, you’re out.

Gymnasts, swamis, and ten-year-olds with knees made out of rubber are good at this game. Everyone else would be wise to give it a miss.

But building a container universe is a knee-safe version of the same game: How low can you go?

How small can you make your container universe and still be able to tell a story in it?

Let’s find out.

The diagram above is every container universe in existence. The barrier around the gray core keeps what belongs in your universe in, and everything that doesn’t belong out.

A container universe is a planned, carefully limited storytelling setting designed for the writing of series fiction, in which only those elements established as necessary in the first story can appear in later stories.

So what do you put in the container? How do you establish your rules?

Let’s start with a demo: The main character is a man who has been imprisoned for twenty years so far, knowing that he will never be released.

He’s in solitary confinement, his food is pushed through the door to him at intervals, he has a one-foot by one-foot barred window in his cell through which he can see daylight, and if he stands on his bed, he can see a sliver of the world outside.

The only human voices he hears are the voices of the guards, who twice a day come around and shout “Chow!” and twice a day come around and shout “Trays!” Once a week, a guard comes by and takes his clothes, sheets, and toiletries, and replaces them with new.

In his room, he has a sink, a toilet, a bed, the window, and enough floor space to do exercises, but he does not ever, and will not ever, leave his room.

He has no access to television, radio, the internet, mail, music, books, magazines, movies, or musical instruments (not even a harmonica).

He does have a weekly supply of flimsy paper and a weekly supply of crayons (not pointy, not poisonous, not weapon-y) supplied to him by the prison.

This is a small container universe. What are its rules, and what could you possibly do with it?

Time to Dissect A Tiny Universe

With tiny container universes, you’re going to have to look at the details of what exists very carefully. All you have is all you will ever have, so you have to make it count.

What do we have?

- Bed

- Sink

- Walls

- Big door locked from the outside

- Little window that can be looked out of with difficulty

- Ceiling

- Floor

- Toiletries (soap, some variety of non-weaponizable toothbrush, washcloth, towel, comb—no razor, no scissors)

- Bedsheets, changed weekly

- One set of clothes: underwear, socks, shirt and pants or one-piece overall, changed weekly

- Food

- Tray, twice a day

- Paper

- Crayons

This list gives you the first rule.

RULE #1: Your container universe is spatial, and affects all characters within it physically.

What else is there? The what else here is either going to make or break your story, because this is a short, grim List O’ Stuff.

Believe it or not, though, you have enough in this container universe to write not just a short story, but a whole series of novels if you want to.

How? By engaging both your character and your readers in the same process: building parts of your universe for you.

Your character is capable of creating his own universe, if you decide to provide that option. No thinking human being, confined to a single room, must live within the confines of that room. With paper and crayons, (or just with his mind), our character can create a full universe of his own, in drawings or in mental images or in words. He can—if he chooses—escape from his circumstances into something better that he makes for himself. Or, depending upon who he is, into something even worse.

By giving this character crayons and paper, you establish the set of rules under which your universe operates. Paper and crayons, introduced in the first scene, show that they are part of the physics of the place. They are part of the universe, supposed to be there. So…

Rule #2: Nothing unplanned goes in or out.

Your readers are equally suited to expand the universe, to anticipate the character’s thoughts as well as his actions, to start trying to create bits of universe they want to see him develop and actions they want to see him take. They’ll base their worldbuilding on cues you give them, so it’s your job to misdirect their attention.

At this point, what goes on the paper comes into play, as well as what happens to it when the prisoner is finished with it.

So here is where you have to be clever, have to ask yourself questions about the artifacts—the prisoner’s creations—that are piling up in the man’s cell. You have to show them to the reader, have to let the reader see them clearly—but you can guide the reader into misinterpreting them.

The guard studied the drawing: A pretty little blue house, sunlit, with children playing in their yard or sprawled on the grass with big smiles on their faces, and through the big window in the front of the house, a blonde woman carving a roast, pink walls around her, red carpet underfoot.

Looked a lot like his house, he thought, and his family. Carpet was wrong, though.

We don’t yet know who the man in the cell is. What he did. Whether he is innocent or guilty, good or evil. We see a drawing done by the man, and it’s pretty. Happy. Has some personal meaning to the guard who is holding the drawing.

What if the guard is wrong? What if, because it is beautifully rendered and rather sweet, the guard takes it home, has it framed, puts it on a wall.

What if it is not just a drawing, but an artifact with arcane symbols drawn underneath, a curse from the prisoner on his jailer?

What if the roast the woman is carving is her husband, the carpet is red with blood, the children have gone insane? What if the man in the cell, confined for perpetrating some other form of horror in person, has found a way to create horror from a distance with paper and colored wax?

That which is ordinary need not be mentioned.

In a container universe, because there is so little to work with, you run a great risk of giving importance to ordinary items, simply because there is so little else.

Crayons and paper are an odd thing to have in a prison cell. If you put the paper and the crayons in a tiny cell that has only one other distinguishing feature—the window—that paper and those crayons are going to have to carry tremendous weight. They cannot do something little. They have to do something enormous.

But the bed—well, you expect a bed of some sort. With a mattress of some sort.

So if the man in the cell is very clever and very cautious, you might choose to give the reader cause to become suspicious of the contents of the mattress, which could be used to store a few folded drawings, a few crayons made pliable and molded by body heat and a great deal of craftsmanship into odd and disturbing shapes.

Which gives us…

Rule #3: Everything in the container is part of the story, and every bit of it matters.

At one point, when we were living way out in the country and my life was ruled by a few acres of lawn and grass I could hear growing at night, I had this odd little idea to mark off a square foot of it with posts and string, go out every day and take a picture of that square for some set period of time, catalogue the changes, and then write a story set within my one square foot of grass.

I had deadlines, and the yard had entire war zones of fire ants, and I didn’t go through with it. But I still like the idea. Anything that disappeared from my little patch of aggressive cow-pasture-turned-lawn would vanish from my characters’ universe, anything that appeared would do so as an act of magic, but I’d decided that the characters would never know the true nature of their universe.

The reader would have to be in on the story, would have to see each day’s photograph—because without understanding the limitations, without being able to see the daily images of the patch of grass I was writing from, he would not understand the brutal limitations my characters faced. He would not understand the devastation that a shovel, or a lawnmower, or someone else’s dog wandering across the back yard could bring to the lives of my little characters in their tiny universe.

Your characters do not need to know they live inside a container universe. But…

Rule #4: At some point, you must make the reader aware of the nature of your universe.

Next, if you create a container universe, the container is part of the story, and frequently the point of the story. In the movie The Truman Show (starring Jim Carrey), the main character was raised in a container universe, and in discovering the existence of the container, found out his whole life was a lie. This was a very well-done container-universe story.

Contrast it with Gilligan’s Island.

In this 1960s television series Gilligan’s Island, the fact that seven characters were tossed onto an island cut off from everything, and tried to find their way off, was the core around which their existences revolved. Or would have been…except that show is a demonstration of what happens when you break your own rules by allowing your container to leak endlessly.

What could have been a cool coconut-punk story of bamboo tech and interesting relationships between the characters was utterly ruined by the constant influx of guest stars, boats, planes, gorillas, lions… Gilligan’s Island stands as the icon of what not to do with a container universe.

As does Lost, its even-leakier recent television show twin. Twice now, desert islands in the middle of the ocean have become the most trafficked points on the planet, and the stories told on them have been lousy, in so many different ways. (I dissected Lost and its egregious sins against the art of storytelling in How To Think Sideways, so I won’t repeat myself here.)

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the container universe built by Hugh Howey for his superb self-published series Wool. Almost all of the characters are very aware of their container, but completely unaware of its true nature, or its meaning. Howey builds the stories out slowly and carefully, treating the rules of his container universe with the utmost respect, following actions with consequences, and revealing the little truths of the world within his universe in ways that reveal even as they misdirect.

I recommend the Wool series, not just because it’s a terrific story, but as an example of just how much you can achieve writing inside a container universe.

(Added note here: Howey’s container universe starts small, but [while avoiding spoilers] becomes larger as the story progresses. He does not cheat—ever—but he is very good at misdirection, and as you discover the changing shape of the container, you realize that you’ve been misidentifying what he’s been showing you all along.

You do not know all the characters, you do not have access to all the tech or background. Nevertheless, nothing goes in and nothing goes out that you do not see—and the container is the point of the universe.)

Rule #5: Figure out WHY your story exists inside a container, then use the container to make the story stronger.

If you decide you want to write inside a container universe, you start asking yourself questions. And the first is, “Why do I need the container at all?”

Here are four great reasons for writing inside container universes.

You maintain control of your story. You won’t wake up lost one morning in the middle of New York City, wondering how you got there or how you’re supposed to get out; your characters won’t get up and move to Albuquerque…or Zimbabwe; your plot will not drag your ass to the bottom of the ocean to mine for undersea cities in the middle of your search for the body missing from the cemetery; and you will not suddenly discover that Bob the Librarian is a Tasmanian spy running a brothel out of the back of the local bingo parlor.

You develop a hardcore readership. The people who understand that you’re writing Oatville, and who have read your first Oatville story, and who love your little group of homey folks doing homey things, will come back for more as long as you can deliver what they love. They are not looking for either Tasmanian spies or bingo brothels. You can deliver homemade cookies and children playing in the apple orchard, and because you are giving them something they desire and aren’t getting elsewhere, they will beat a path to your door.

You know your way around. You can create a family. You don’t have to, of course. Not all container universes keep a regular cast of characters (read Wool for an example of one which connects characters, but does not keep all of them in the story). But if you want a cast of regulars, you can have friendly faces waiting for you when you go in to work every day, people you enjoy hanging out with and get to know very well.

You can build traction. Your short stories and long fiction, all set in the same container universe, will sell off each other, which, as you find your readership, will allow you to start making some money at this. If you love Oatville, being the Internet’s Oatville Guy, and having a bunch of readers who can’t wait for Oatville: The Book Of Oats Nine, is a good thing.

In general, stories set in container universes will be about the containers in which they’re set. Oatville could be the name of a series: it is clearly the name of the container. You go into this story expecting before you have read the first word that it will take place in a small town somewhere, and that among the cast of characters, the town will hold a major role.

Always, if you’re writing a container universe, you will put time and care into establishing the rules of the container, and your readers will read to find out how the container works, and how the characters inside of it live their lives.

So the container needs to be interesting. It can be cool. It can be odd. As in:

- A slow ship traveling through space, cut off from everything else in the universe.

- A freak show whose members live inside protected walls: who sell views of their lives via the Internet, while never interacting with anyone outside of their closed world.

- A home where a crazy woman keeps her boarders captive.

- A one-foot-by-one-foot square of grass.

- An Ohio village transported to Mars.

It can also be comfy—one well-known container universe centers around a small town in the mountains of North Carolina, where religion and home-baked goods provide shelter against a world that is never permitted to reach inside its tight-knit confines.

Whether you go with odd, wacky, or comfortable—or some strange amalgam of your own, your container universe has to be physically small. And it has to have a small population.

New York City, for all that it’s physically small, cannot be a container universe. You cannot ride herd on twenty-one million people—or even the eight-million plus in the confines of the city proper. Even if you dug the foundations of NYC out of the rivers and harbor, wrapped the whole thing in a spiffy disaster-proof egg, and shot the city into space, it would STILL be too big to be a container world.

New York City—intact and thriving—is an Infinite Universe.

This from the perspective of the storyteller—not from a mathematical definition of infinite.

Why? Because someone can die on the side of a New York city street and never be identified by anyone. Because whole cultures of people with separate religions and languages can exist within the confines of the place without ever coming into contact with each other, and without ever needing to learn each other’s languages—in other words, without ever having to connect in any way.

If you’re familiar with the concept of Six Degrees of Separation, where just about any human being can be linked to any other human being if you go through six steps of “Kate knows Bob, and Bob knows Jim, and Jim knows Congressmen Mary, and Congressman Mary knows the President, even if she doesn’t like him,” you have linked Kate to the President in FOUR degrees of separation.

My closest tie to the big time (that I know of) was three degrees, actually, back when I was talking regularly by phone to Jim Baen, who was friends with Newt Gingrich, who knew the President. Silly as it is, I do sometimes consider these things.

But in any case, your degree of separation between any two people in a container universe is going to be “about two and falling.” As in, “I knew your mother when she was taking joyrides in space-speeders back when she was fifteen…and now I know you.”

Two degrees of separation. Falling to one.

In a container universe, every human being is connected in some direct way to others in that universe, shares a history with those people, and will not be able to disappear without people realizing he is gone.

In container universe stories, characters rarely stay in the background. They might have a background role in one story, be a central character in a second, and introduce one new central character to another in a third, before dropping into the background again for a bit.

Finally, one additional reason for writing in a container universe: Doing so requires few resources.

The Twilight Zone, hampered by a limited budget, spent a lot of time on Container Universe stories—some are great, a lot are dreadful, but you can see how setting tight limits on your world can cut down on the space, worldbuilding, tracking, and all-around intense focus (and if you’re producing something involving other media, the money) you must spend to present your story.

Your Turn

This exercise is quick and fun. Print off a set of Container Universe worksheets now.

With them in front of you, work your way through the following scenarios.

You’re sitting in a comfortable chair in a room that is dark except for the spot around you. Your part is lit with a warm, friendly light, and is safe.

You smell something interesting coming from the space in front of you. It is something important, something compelling, something that tells you a great deal about what waits in the darkness in front of you.

On your worksheet now, write down that smell.

Settle more deeply into your chair, get comfortable, and think about what this smell tells you about the world you cannot yet see.

Write down three important things this smell tells you about the world.

As you relax, you realize you have been hearing a sound…and this sound, too, is important.

Listen carefully to the sound, identify it as best you can, and when you’re fairly sure you know what it is, write it down.

Now think about the actions causing the sound, and the possible consequences of those action.

Write down the three most important things you learn about the hidden world in front of you from the sound.

Back in your comfortable chair, the light comes up, in front of you, revealing a black wall that you cannot see over or under, and cannot walk around. In the center of the black wall there is a black grille that lets sounds and smells pass through.

In the center of the grille, there is a circle just large enough for you to look through with one eye. The circle is covered with unbreakable glass, so you’re completely safe looking through it.

Look through, and discover the source of the sound and smell you’ve been discovering.

Are they what you thought they would be, or are they different?

On your worksheet, identify what you see. And write down three important discoveries you’ve made from  being able to see what you first smelled, then heard.

Finally, realize that the world you have discovered is enclosed within the high black wall. Once you start telling your story, it will become invisible, but it will never go away.

Consider the limitations the world you have discovered faces because of this wall.

The wall is too high for anything to fly over. It is too deep for anything to dig under.

The basic objects that exist in your world in this instant are all that will ever exist in your world.

Write down the three most important ways in which this wall restricts what can happen within your new universe.

Once you’ve finished your own container universe, go to the next page to take a look at what I got, and I’ll walk you through how I got it, and how I could use it.

What I Got

I never expect what I get when doing one of these exercises. Which is, in fact, the point of the exercise. When you head into your worldbuilding without a plan, you discover all sorts of interesting surprises floating around in your head.

So I’m going to walk you through my answers, and do a little explaining where necessary, because…well, you’ll see.

I started with the smell. Awesome smell.

Apple pie baking, warm buttery crust, cinnamon.

1) That this world contains apples, butter, cinnamon --> thus trees, cows

2) Atmosphere is Earth-like, has soil and an O2/CO2 cycle in order for trees and cows to survive

3) Has some folks who are human or originated on Earth in it

The first part of this exercise gives you a very specific demonstration of what I mean when I say a smell tells you a great deal.

It requires thought and practice to start dissecting the reality of a world from a single smell. You do it by asking: What are the ingredients or components of a smell.

Hot apple pie is a rich and wonderful smell, and the real thing comes from very specific origins.

Apples = Apple Trees = Temperate Climate With Marked Seasons and Loamy Soil and Water and Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide and Full Sun

Cinnamon = Cinnamon Trees = Tropical Climate and High Heat and Full Sun to Partial Shade and Acid Soil and 150 Days of Rain (or equivalent)

Butter, flour, salt, sugar, and other ingredients all have their own strict requirements, and suggest that although this is a container universe, it is a universe with different biomes.

To me, different biomes suggest either a big world (which cannot be a container world) or terraforming. So from the combination of apple pie and container universe, I got “someplace small in outer space.” This is how my mind works. Your mileage will vary.

On, then, to the sound. I got:

Children laughing and shouting, but in no language I recognize

1) Apple pie is Northern European in origin, and requires temperate climate

2) Total language transitions take centuries, so far future possible

3) Alternative planet (terraformed small moon?) becomes possible

More of my mind’s little quirks. Here’s the logic behind one.

In #1, I start with the Earth origin of apple pie as I know it, which was from around 1500’s England. I jump to the origin of those folks like me who consider it “home food”—and who are usually of specifically UK descent (though I’m a mutt—my ancestors were enthusiastic rather than selective).

Apple pie and the English language originated and grew up together, so my subconscious mind suggested, when I heard a language I could not recognize (as opposed to could not speak—I can identify European language families from sound even though I frequently miss on correctly identifying Eastern Europe’s specific languages) my mind did not jump to “apple pie adopted by a different culture” which might seem like a more obvious choice, but to #2’s “apple pie in the distant future.”

This, again, is because of what I have stored in my subconscious combining with the sort of things I like to write about.

Dropping back to the last item in #1, I mention the temperate climate. Apples are the essential ingredient in apple pie, and require a temperate climate—my subconscious threw this in to remind me that my little world has to have seasons.

In #3, I suggest terraforming outright. This suggestion colors what my subconscious mind shows me.

And that suggestion heavily affects what I see when I look into my world in the third set of questions.

Children playing are not human norm, sky is off-color, dome visible

1) Children are markedly tall and slender--low gravity = small world

2) Gravity not augmented: World is pre-Known Space or rogue settlers

3) Home-baked pie suggests either wealth or primitivism

Here I see children who have grown up in low gravity and are thus taller and thinner-boned than those of us whose bodies have to contend with the greater forces that pull against us in Earth’s atmosphere.

I find myself right now imagining the skinny cows on this far-away little moon, and wondering if, taller, their necks have elongated in keeping with their legs, or if they’re stuck grazing on tall grass.

With #2, my subconscious mind starts feeding me elements from my Settled Space universe in case I want to hook this into those stories (turns out I do). Tech worlds in Settled Space have very good gravity control. Good terraforming preceded good gravity control, so this world was settled after terraforming but before gravity control.

This lets me place the settling of this moon into a specific time period in the Settled Space timeline. It also allows me to figure out a general date before which access to the moon had to have been cut off by something. If access had not been cut off, when gravity control came along the inhabitants of this moon would have adopted the technology in order to permit its folks to travel safely to all human-normed worlds.

In #3, I explore my options for why the world was settled, which are a voluntary return to primitivism—which doesn’t work if you have to maintain space domes and their contents; or, the place being a resort for the wealthy which somehow got stranded—yet which had enough tech-savvy folks on hand to keep it running and keep folks alive.

BOTTLE

1) Population small. Founder effect (genetic doubling with abnormalities and other related issues), pedigrees to prevent this as much as possible are going to be essential.

2) Food supply will make population controls essential.

3) Wealth suggests presence of a class structure originally. Survival of the world suggests adaptation to homegrown trade.

I'm positing a small group of folks, once wealthy, who settled on a terraformed moon (terraforming a moon to the point of growing your own Earth food is expensive), who suffered some sort of break with the rest of the universe, and who are trapped. Most don't know they’re trapped, or remember that anything exists beyond their domes. Without transport or communication between their moon and others, they have adapted a trade-and-barter economy.

Stories will be about a small band of creators-traders who travel between the domes. And who, to end the series, greet the first visitors to the moon in somewhere between six and ten generations after communication with the outside universe broke.

My BOTTLE answers and summation are self-explanatory (at least after all the previous explaining), so this is where I end up.

I’m not sure I will write these stories, but I like the world I’ve come up with, and I have a few characters already auditioning for parts should I decide I actually want to.

That’s the quickest and easiest way to build a container universe from scratch.

Realize that a hundred different writers, all coming from the starting point of the smell of apple pie, would come up with a hundred different unique universes, and not one of those universes would be anything like the one I created. Almost none of them would lead to high-tech science fiction.

If you have a story type or genre already in mind, just scrawl the sort of thing you’re looking for down on the first page of your worksheets before you start, to give your Muse a clear idea of what sorts of details to toss in your direction.

So now let’s move on to Knowable Universes, and to the fun you can have when you add a pass-through to a Container.

CHAPTER 12

Knowable Universes

A River Runs Through It

Container universes are closed. You can know everyone and everything that happens within your universe.

Knowable universes are different. People and things move in and out, surprises pop up, houses might fall out of the sky from time to time, dropping on your wicked witches and making your Lollipop Guild burst into song.

The river (or pass-through, if we’re going to skip the poetic metaphor) that runs through your world, though, is a knowable and understandable sort of river. If you’ve set up your world so that rivers are full of fish, your pass-through river will bring you fish of different sorts. It will not, however, bring you water sprites, King Kong’s angry son on a raft, or aliens from the planet Zorgax come to steal your wimminfolk.

The Knowable

Universe

The concept of the Knowable Universe is the box bisected by a passageway that is open on both ends. Your story lives in the box, your primary characters live in the box, but people and things come in and go out regularly. They move in and out through a pass-through.

Pass-through: A planned and controlled entrance and exit for characters and conflict in a story universe.

Think of a neighborhood in a town or city. If you’re sociable, you know most of your neighbors. If you’re not, you at least recognize some of them because it’s important to know who belongs in your little area and who’s suspect and needs to be watched.

From the writing point of view, you’re sociable because you need to know the folks in your created universe. But you’ll also be very familiar with the route they take to the mall outside their neighborhood, somewhat familiar with their route to the nearest city, and you’ll have at least a concept of how they’d have to travel to the next state or country—and in consequence, the route strangers would have to take to reach them.

Your Knowable Universe is full of quirky local characters, but it also has annoying out-of-state in-laws who drop in unannounced, traveling salesmen bringing in nifty new products from those geniuses in Big City, and the girl or guy who got away, and who leaves your main character pining for the past. (Or the science fiction, fantasy, western, romance, mystery or other genre equivalent).

If you’re familiar with late-70s-early-eighties television, well, first, I’m sorry.

But second, back then there was a painfully long-running series called The Love Boat. It featured a cruise liner, (which no doubt did wonders for the cruise industry), a quirky cast of mainstays who worked on the ship, and a never-ending stream of has-beens, hope-to-bes, and never-weres who boarded the ship each week in their search for true love, an end to singleness, or a weekend fix for their awful 30-year marriages.

This show, in its own horrible way, exemplifies the concept of the Knowable Universe. You always knew you were going to see the main cast of characters: the charming captain, the cranky ship doctor, the goofy and not-too-bright purser, the wise bartender, the painfully perky cruise director, and so on.

You always knew you were going to get three little love stories (generally one for younger viewers, one for older viewers, and one for the mid-range group). One would be cranky-turns-kind, one would be funny, and one would be sweet or wistful.

(Yes, I am familiar with this show. For some of this time period, my family only got one channel on our television, and if the show was on that channel, that was what we watched. Later, I was working in a nursing home as part of my nursing education, and every single resident of the nursing home had the show on—seemingly all the time. It was inescapable—and I think it was on some sort of hellish infinite loop.)

What the viewer did not know in advance about any particular episode of the Love Boat was who would show up, what problems they would be facing, or how the crew of the Love Boat would tie those problems into a neatly solved bow by the end of the episode.

And that—for all that it is a show I wouldn’t recommend to my worst enemy—is the exquisite and beautiful promise of the Knowable Universe.

It is the home base and haven of addictive series in every conceivable genre, the go-to form when you want to keep readers coming back for more (and don’t want to have to do mammoth amounts of worldbuilding to do it), and it is fun to create and fun to write.

And while I was standing in the shower this morning, I had—and fleshed out—the idea for one of these knowable worlds that I discovered I want to write.

So let’s do a quick run-through of the rules. Then you’ll put a Knowable Universe together, and after that, I’ll show you mine.

RULE #1: Your universe is spatial but probably won’t fit on a single sheet of paper.

In general, you’ll map out a little area that your moderately changeable primary cast of characters inhabits, and this single area will define your main cast—it will—in general—be their reason to be together. It can be a town, a building, a ship (space, water, time or other), or some other setting.

However, just as a single town map has individual houses (or rooms, or decks), your Knowable Universe can expand across larger forms.

RULE #2: Knowable Universes can cover a significant amount of conceptual space.

You can keep your knowable universe tightly nailed to a space as small as any container universe story.

You can, however, have a Known Universe spread out across a galaxy.

The trick is in carefully defining the limitations of your universe.

You posit, let’s say, five planets found by explorers in a single solar system or—if your tech level is higher—your galaxy, that are reachable with existing technology, terraformable with existing technology and the budget available to the settlers who wish to move there, and that are within reach of each other with the existing communication technology.

Further posit the settlers are all part of the same group that shares close ties.

What might these ties be? At one point in 1989 or 1990, I wrote a story titled Friends In Space with the intent of becoming the agnostic Jessamyn West of Quaker science fiction (don’t ask), and this was the story I planned to launch the series with. It was also, however, the story that Charles C. Ryan, editor of Aboriginal Science Fiction, killed with the terse and clearly shaken rejection slip that said only, “Much, much, much, much, too much exposition.”

I wish I still had that rejection slip. It was formative in my career. It was, in fact, the last one I got before I sold my first two small works to Aboriginal. (These were humorous sonnets, the first of which was published under the name Holly Lisle Deaton, while the second was my first publication as Holly Lisle)

Aboriginal Science Fiction: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/aboriginal_sf

Thank you, Charles C. Ryan.

ANYWAY…

Religion, philosophy, gender, race, politics, and sexual orientation are just a starter set on the reasons that a group of folks would decide to settle five colonies on five separate worlds, and figuring out the why of that is part of your process in creating your Knowable Universe.

You work out the details essential to your storytelling as you need them, making sure that each detail you add:

- Contributes something that fits with the rest of what you’ve already built, and

- Offers something new you can use to make your stories richer

By doing this, you set firm limits. If you pay close attention to your tech and don’t let it run away with you, you can keep your folks under domes, able to trade with each other via space travel with time delays, and you allow for a certain amount of growth (as chosen by the existing inhabitants, who may want more settlers, or who may not).

As long as you establish that your characters can communicate across the worlds in a timely facing—and as long as they do—they won’t lose their common language…though it will definitely develop individual accents and quirks unless there is some shared medium like television to smooth out the variables.

RULE #3: Knowable Universes cannot cover a significant amount of physical space.

Even if you spread your characters across a multiverse, your knowable universe must consist of houses and businesses you’ve seen the insides of, folks whose names you know, and a concept that you keep firmly in check. Strangers wandering in fit your concept, new sections of map fit your concept, and everything stays within your defined boundaries.

In your Five Little Space Colonies series, for example, you can add some new domes on one of the five colonies if you need to, but you’re going to screw things up with your working concept and your readers’ understanding of what you’re doing if you add a sixth colony.

If you’re writing a murder mystery cozy in which the amiable sleuth solves crimes in Lesser Widget, you cannot move her to London.

There’s an old saying that fits Knowable Universe stories. Dance with the one who brought you.

RULE #4: Every Knowable Universe must have a limited pass-through.

The existence of the pass-through is what keeps your universe from being a Container Universe.

Its presence is the critical element that establishes your universe as Knowable. Things go in, things go out, but they are planned things that fit parameters the writer has determined while developing the world.

Keeping the pass-through limited is half of what prevents your universe from becoming an Infinite Universe. (The other half is the absence of story physics, which are the essential characteristic of Infinite Universes. We’ll get to that in the next chapter.)

Your limited pass-through is what creates your conflict, every story, every time.

Your Turn

The Knowable Universe needs a concept sentence. And that concept sentence needs to include your limited pass-through.

Small-town Kansas residents sitting on the edge of an ancient ruin deal with an influx of mummies, curses, magical creatures, and the temptations of magical power—along with struggles to get better TV reception and faster internet.

Break this sentence down.

We have a small town in Kansas and the folks who live in it. This could be a container universe—but the pass-through is built in: “influx of mummies, curses, magical creatures, and the temptations of magical power.”

So your story here is about people trying to get on with their normal lives in a universe that is not normal.

Sure, they could move—but there have to be some cool benefits to living near a magical place, and the folks who stay will be interesting because they have taken on this weird challenge, and because they both suffer for and benefit from it.

Here’s another example, this one a bit trickier.

Nosey old village lady with a keen eye for detail and a jaundiced view of humanity knits and travels while solving murders and making the authorities look dumb.

This is a Marple Clone Knowable Universe with a dual pass-through. And the first part of the pass-through is the tricky bit.

Travels is the obvious part. If you’re going places, you’re going to step into and out of the stream of other folks’ lives.

Knits is the part of the concept most folks will mistake for characterization—but if you’re a female knitter, you know that the second you pull out knitting in public, you become invisible to about 99% of the population.

The occasional little kid will notice you because you’re doing something vaguely dangerous-looking with jiggling string and a handful of gleaming, pointy sticks. (Knitting two socks at a time on one long-loop needle is a lousy way to remain invisible, by the way. That particular trick, especially once the socks start being sock-shaped, is an unfortunate conversation starter with other women.)

Almost all men, however, will register ANY woman knitting with a silent scream of horror and wrap the woman doing it in a shield of No I do NOT see her, and (except for the two-socks-at-once thing) most women will write the public knitter off as equally uninteresting—leaving the knitter to sit, unbothered, eavesdropping and watching everything that goes on around her to her heart’s content for long periods of time.

If you’re a man, forget about the “knitting as urban camouflage” shtick. You might as well wear a hat with a flashing red beacon and a siren on top.

Not being a man, I’m not sure what the male urban camouflage equivalent is.

Okay. Little bit of a digression there, but knitting is a pass-through because your nosey character can effectively watch and listen to people all around her in her own locale while giving all appearances of being completely focused on the activity in her hands. Thus, knits and travels is a dual pass-through that lets your Miz Nosey observe people she finds suspicious both at home and abroad.

So now you need to create a concept sentence.

The first part of your Knowable Universe concept sentence is “home.”

Home is your primary location.

In my first concept sentence example, it is:

Small-town Kansas residents sitting on the edge of an ancient ruin deal with an influx of mummies, curses, magical creatures, and the temptations of magical power—along with struggles to get better TV reception and faster internet.

In my second concept sentence example, it is:

Nosey old village lady with a keen eye for detail and a jaundiced view of humanity knits and travels while solving murders and making the authorities look dumb.

Home is the place you and your readers want to keep coming back to, so make it someplace you love. Make your Kansas town charming, full of charming old Sears Roebuck kit houses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Catalog_Home

Give it a little main street that still has a drug store with a soda fountain and a corner post office and a store with fine women’s clothing, with another one for men.

Have apartments over the businesses.

Make it the place you’d want to live.

Then add the second part of your Knowable Universe concept sentence, your pass-through. The pass-through brings your story’s conflict in, so define it carefully, and make sure you understand how it works.

In my first example pass-through, an ancient ruin with an influx of mummies, curses, magical creatures, and the temptations of magical power, I have carefully included the source of the conflict—the ancient ruin—as well as the elements of conflict themselves: mummies, curses, magical creatures, and the temptations of magical power.

Kansas is home to the Wichita tribe, to the northernmost outpost of the Puebloans, to the Plains Apache, and other tribes.

The Pueblo tribe built structures that would serve my need for an ancient ruin, and had a culture that would be able to serve up the necessary mummies, curses, magical creatures, and free-roaming magical powers.

With a half hour’s research, I could uncover conflicts for a dozen novelettes.

The third part of your Knowable Universe concept sentence is your tone. Tone defines the way you’re going to play the stories, and it takes a bit of practice.

The tone of my first sentence is “quirky and offbeat,” established by the juxtaposition of the elements of ancient curses, mummies, and magical creatures with the need to get faster internet and non-sucky television reception. Think Buffy The Vampire Slayer On The Prairie.

The tone of my second sentence is “knitting and genteel travel, knives in the back and arsenic in the tea,” in other words, the well-established murder cozy. (But the sentence is a pure clone of Christie’s Marple, which is a defining series in the murder cozy tradition.)

So go to your worksheet, write out a few possible homes, a few possible pass-throughs, and some concept tones you like, and put them together in different combinations until you come up with something you’d have fun doing for five or ten stories. (I’m talking short stories here, but you can think novel if you like. It works exactly the same way.)

The way you make this work in any genre is to establish yourself as the Official Old Geezer of your universe, and remember that each story home must be normal to its residents, and that each story pass-through must contain elements that are shocking to its residents.

By playing against type—by making the story home exotic to your readers, and your pass-through mundane to your readers, you can double the types of universes you create.

And this “playing against type” approach is exactly the formula for the worldbuilding of the Harry Potter series. Harry Potter is in fact a prime example of a Knowable Universe series, built from the characters’ perspective that Magic is normal, while the Muggle universe is mysterious and incomprehensible.

What I Got

So as I said earlier, I had an idea in the shower.

But I also wanted to demonstrate how to play with and change that idea, try it with other ideas, and in general mix and match until I got something I couldn’t resist.

My demonstration below, therefore, is what I got by doing the full Knowable Universe exercise. And here’s what I got.

HOMES

An old Winnebago that's had a few owners

A self-aware house that chooses its own special inhabitants

An modern island village in a lovely archipelago

A forgotten settlement in a deep, mountainous jungle

A rundown Mississippi riverboat undergoing restoration

A cattle ranch in the American West

PASS-THROUGHS

A Miami street in a business district going to seed

A resort with a nine-month tourist season

A trade school with a steady flow of new students

A little box that invites certain visitors to open it

A magical map to places you probably shouldn't go

In doing this exercise, my original shower idea morphed into something better—something that more perfectly fits the Minecraft Map I’m building of the place (yes, this course includes both the downloadable in-progress Minecraft Map of Weyrd’s Place™ for those of you who already own Minecraft, and in the course expansion, a video tour and explanation of the whats and whys).

I love this exercise. But back to the actual exercise, and I’ll show you some of the different universes I got before I came up with the alterations that are going to make Weyrd’s Place™ especially fun for me to write.

Because my favorite genres to write in are science fiction and fantasy, all the homes and pass-throughs on my list below suggest SF/fantasy universes to me.

But now I’m going to show you how I got a broader range from the ideas that my Muse offered up.

DEMO ONE:

HOME: A rundown Mississippi riverboat undergoing restoration

PLUS…

PASS-THROUGH: A magical map to places you probably shouldn't go

EQUALS: A group of twenty-something friends buy a battered old riverboat, intending to renovate it and offer river tours, and discover a river map folded away in the purser’s safe that lures them into dark places that plagued the river when the boat was new.

You saw the home, the old riverboat, in my list. You know the pass-through—the trouble map.

The tone here started out being neutral for me, but I edited it to creepy by substituting lures for the original guides, dark places for the original destinations, and plagued the river for the original existed.

DEMO TWO:

HOME: A forgotten settlement in a deep, mountainous jungle

PLUS…

PASS-THROUGH: A resort with a nine-month tourist season

EQUALS: A more-than-he-appears tour-guide takes resort visitors on mule trips up to a forgotten settlement only he knows about, introducing them to the mysterious inhabitants; no tourist leaves the settlement unchanged.

Weirdly, depending on the true identity of the tour guide and the nature of the village and its inhabitants, I can see this one as anything from pure horror to some pretty steamy romance.

In the horror version, the guide would be the servant of whatever lives in the village, the villagers would be anything from dark gods to shape-shifters to kinky cannibals, and the tourists would leave as mere animated shells, if they left at all, with everything that mattered about them fed into the settlement and its people.

In the romance version, the resort would be a singles-only place, the guide would be some variant of Cupid with a wide streak of justice, and the tourists would find the romances they actually deserved—which could be wonderful or horrific, depending on the characters of the folks involved.

And now for my Weyrd’s Place™ knowable universe.

This started out as an image of a rambling, falling-down rooming house jammed between beautiful near-the-beach condos in South Florida. That image led me to creating a guy who’d just been laid off, and to his  getting a tip and a business card from a mousey girl working in a 7-Eleven that if he went to the address on the card, where he’d be close to the beach (his heart’s desire), he could find both a job and live in that rooming house.

It morphed the first time when I started putting a Minecraft Map together to see what the house was like, and morphed the second time when I realized the guy who’d been laid off worked the crime beat for a local newspaper for about fifteen years.

And then I did this exercise, and my knowable universe morphed for the third time as I discovered the missing piece to the puzzle I’ve been building…the WHY piece.

So.

DEMO THREE

HOME: A self-aware house that chooses its own special inhabitants

PLUS…

PASS-THROUGH: A Miami street in a business district going to seed

EQUALS: A laid-off journalist takes up residence in a room last occupied by a suicidal novelist—and in his pursuit of truth finds a new, unnerving life (and a dangerous readership) pursuing a weirder beat than Miami crime.

I had the idea of a big boarding house or multi-unit rental place as my story’s home, and something in or around the house as my pass-through. I had the idea of the other residents of the house (not mentioned here, but nicely tucked away in my head). What I didn’t know until I did this exercise was WHY.

Why those people? Why that location? Why was the journalist special enough to get a room there?

Doing this exercise, in the instant I realized the house was picking its own inhabitants, I also discovered it was a main character, and it had an agenda.

So I have some more short stories to write. Weyrd’s Place™ stories will make up the content of the other short-work series I do to build up my inventory of inexpensive introductory work.

Here are a couple of flat images of the house. You’ll be able to download a handful of additional 2D downloads from some of my Minecraft worlds, along with notes on what they are and how I use them, but the meat of the Minecraft material, which consists of the downloadable, playable maps and the videos with notes and commentary—which will be of most interest to folks doing Geek Deep Worldbuilding—makes up a significant chunk of the optional Create A World Clinic Expansion.

This is the exterior of the house, my series home, and also one of the characters. Note that the windows are different shapes and sizes. I discovered as I was building the place that no two apartments could be the same or have the same layout. I didn’t discover why until I found out the house was picking its occupants…and at that point, I realized the house configures itself to suit its occupants...or perhaps to force them to suit it.

This is a case of the subconscious mind making what seem like whimsical suggestions while you’re building something, and the conscious mind asking, “Why, why, why are we doing this?” until it and your subconscious mind, working together, come up with something that explains it.

Above, the view from the pier. I don’t know why the house has a pier, but my subconscious mind assures me that pier is not a warm, cozy, dangle-your-feet-in-the-ocean sort of pier.

Above, part of the lobby. It doesn’t say “welcome home” to me. It’s more like, “I’m hungry. Step onto my tongue.” (Remember, I built the whole place, every stick of it, before I found out the house was an active participant.)

And finally, above, the sign posted beside the lobby’s check-in desk. “Reminder: Management is no longer sending rescue parties to Hell. Travel at your own risk.”

My subconscious mind insisted I post that sign. I have neither an idea of what it means nor any plan for how I’ll use it. It will simply chew on my brain cells for a while until ideas connect the right way, and something interesting pops out.

And that note segues us into the final chapter of SANE worldbuilding.

Infinite Universes, of course. Onward.

CHAPTER 13

Infinite Universes

The Magic of Do-It-Yourself Physics

If you’re a math-hater, science-phobic, or don’t entirely believe that the ball in your hand is going to fall to the floor 100% of the time when you drop it, take a deep breath here, while I reassure you that this is going to be okay.

Story physics: The rules and limitations you place on how your story universe can work.

You don’t have to do math (though you can). You don’t have to design elaborate experiments to make sure what you posit in the story will work the same way in real life (though you can).

You don’t have to build your own chemistry lab and grow your own new life forms (but you can…and if you can, dammit, I want to know how you did it).

The purpose of story physics is simply this. You establish not what your characters can do, but what they cannot.

Infinite Universes live and die on story physics, and on how religiously you adhere to the rules you’ve created.

Because in an Infinite Universe, there is no map per se. You may have a map. But by the nature of that which is infinite, you can always add another map when you get tired of the one you have.

You are not bound by a cast. You’ll have a cast, but you can walk away from them at any time, create a whole new cast, set them on your whole new map, and write a whole new series of stories—and have them all still be the SAME series you were writing before, only different.

You are not even bound by a genre. If you want to write comedies and tragedies, mysteries and romances and horror, and anything else that slips down your fingertips and starts organizing itself into letters and words, you can write these stories inside the framework of your Infinite Universe, and they will fit.

You are not bound by anything except what you have decided in advance will be your Rules Of How Things Work.

And this…

…This is the Holy Grail of Writerdom.

If you build an Infinite Universe right, you give yourself the freedom to create an unlimited number of stories set in an infinite number of locations with any characters you care to write about, telling any stories you care to tell…and you get to keep all your readers.

It’s a bit tough to wrap your head around this, but if you’re just now considering it for the first time, there doesn’t seem to be a way to make it work.

Series seem to be about the same places and the same characters.

People weary of reading about the same people, just as writers get gawdawful sick of writing them. Generally readers burn out at a slower pace than writers do, because a reader can burn through a book in a day—if it’s a big book, maybe a few—while for the writer, that book was created over a measurably significant percentage of lifetime, and during its creation, the writer had to fight with the characters and the locations, and is still bearing some grudges.

Long before I wrote Fire in the Mist, though, I saw the Infinite Universe for the beautiful freedom that it represented, and every single one of my uncounted but plentiful failed thirty-page novel starts before I wrote FITM was an attempt at building infinity.

Working inside an Infinite Universe was—and still is—my goal. Doing this was also the primary drive behind my insane overbuilding of worlds—every time I built a world, I wanted it to be the world in which I set my career, so that I could tell stories to people who would know and love the world I was writing in as much as I did.

Arhel, Settled Space, Matrin, World Gates, Korre, Moon & Sun…every single time, I was swinging for the fences, building a world that I wanted to stay in, keep creating stories in, a world where I could explore the past, present, and future, where I could entertain the people who loved the first books until I wrote my last word.

And every single time, the Three-Book Death Spiral caught me. I’d arrived at the commercial publishing party too late to be a midlister who could grow an audience over time. The computerized order-to-the-net replenishment system was already in place that made it impossible to improve on the first order-in numbers, no matter how good they were. My early royalty statements from Baen, for example, showed my sell-through as 90% and above on most titles. That is, in the world of publishing, fantastic.

Didn’t matter. The series would die because of computerized order-to-the-net chain bookstore replenishment systems, and I’d have to start over.

So now there’s indie publishing. And I’m still swinging for the fences. I’m going back to the Infinite Universe I love the most (Settled Space), going to take my time writing the stories in it that I always wanted to write, bring them out, keep them available…and I’m going to play in other universes when it amuses me to do so, with the knowledge that I get to go back home after I’m done.

Terry Pratchett has a home in Discworld. It is my go-to example for an Infinite Universe—well designed and well used. If you want a bone-deep understanding of what it means to write in an infinite universe, pick up any of his Discworld novels in any order, including the YA ones, start reading…and then keep reading until you start seeing how books that are different thematically, in location, in characters, and even in tone can fit together into one beautiful Infinite Universe.

William Shakespeare also wrote in an Infinite Universe. He wrote fantasy, tragedy, comedy, political commentary and poetry set in a world that always followed the same rules, and proved that old saying: “If you say it in iambic pentameter and fill it with dirty jokes, you can say anything and you won’t be hanged.”

(Not an old saying? Well, it should be.)

Isaac Asimov was an Infinite Universe guy—good, prolific, and fast, too. He didn’t always write in it, but his Three Laws of Robotics Infinite Universe defines the core rule-set for a helluva lot of wonderful stories. At this point, that includes many not written by him.

Anne McCaffrey had Pern, which was an Infinite Universe—though it got away from her a bit when she fudged her rules by allowing time travel. She wrote in that universe her entire career, while vacationing in other places.

Stepping outside SF/F, if you’re writing stories set in a specific time period, or in a specific locale throughout its lifespan, or in New York City (Lawrence Block has an Infinite Universe there), or London, or exploring the history of one compelling family through generations (popular with romance novelists, historical novelists, and crossbreeds of the two), you have the potential to turn these stories into parts of an Infinite Universe.

H.P. Lovecraft, another Infinite Universe guy, wrote amazing dark-fantasy-horror with a rule-set built from personal experiences with night-terrors, anxiety, reclusiveness, and repeated failures and rejection.

Edgar Allen Poe wrote in an Infinite Universe—though I suspect the parameters of his universe were set by alcohol and delirium tremens, so while he’s worth reading to get a feel for the rules of his worldbuilding, don’t follow his methodology.

You can get to the Infinite Universe destination via innumerable routes, passions, motivations, and goals. If you want to create a unified body of work, in which any reader can connect to everything you’ve done from any story you’ve written, the Infinite Universe is the destination you’re seeking.

Time to build your Infinite Universe.

Rule #1: Create rules of limitation.

When creating an infinite universe, your first impulse is likely to be, “Anything can happen.”

I talked about this previously in this book, but it is so important, it bears repeating. (It bears tattooing on your arm if you’re into tattoos, actually. It’s that important, and not just for writers.)

I sat down with a Christie Golden—whose work I liked as much as she liked mine—back in my “be a team player and do collaborations” days. We both thought the world we built was cool. We set up the premise, and pitched it with—“…and we can keep writing in this universe forever, because anything can happen.”

Jim Baen rejected it instantly, with the comment, “If anything can happen, nothing matters.”

(Which is the story behind how I learned this bit of writing wisdom passed on to you back in the Tube of Toothpaste World.)

Memorize this line. It is the single most valuable piece of story creation education I have received in my writing career, and a nice piece of proof that you learn much more from failure than you do from success.

“If anything can happen, nothing matters.”

In a world without limitations, rules, parameters, and impossibilities, no action by an individual or a group means anything.

Example: You have infinite magic.

Villain attempts to kill hero, hero casts spell of protection. Hero attempts to kill villain with bigger weapon, villain casts bigger spell of protection. Villain kills hero with massive weapon, hero returns to life by means of magical amulet…

You’ve seen this before.

Yawn.

So in infinite universes, you carefully set out the things that cannot happen ever, under any circumstances.

I’ll run you through the short set of Rules of Limitation for my Settled Space universe.

1. PRIMARY RULE: Dead is dead—you can’t reju a corpse.

2. Space travel across massive distances works by folding void areas in space—areas containing no matter and little dark matter—together along natural lines of weakness, and threading the ship through the insertion void and out the extraction void instantaneously.

3. Three origami engines must exist to allow triangulation to, and movement through, origami points, but their distance relative to each other is immaterial.

4. No magic. Science can expand beyond rules currently known and do things currently unimaginable, but everything costs, everything has a knowable origin and knowable properties, and all genuine results are reproducible by anyone with appropriate tools and knowledge.

5. No multiverse access—a multiverse may or may not exist, but its (debatable) existence does not and cannot influence in any way what happens in Settled Space.

That’s it.

You would be surprised how enormously restrictive those five short rules are.

I only had the first four when I wrote Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood. In what I’d planned as Book 2, I found myself tempted to break my Primary Rule through the mechanism of access to the hinted-at multiverse.

Fortunately, as I was plotting out and writing the first chapters, I realized that the instant I introduced an accessible multiverse, I destroyed the integrity of my Primary Rule and killed the entire series by creating an instance of “Anything can happen; therefore, nothing matters.”

When I realized that any accessible multiverse became the death of good fiction, I added Rule #5.

Another quick example of rules.

I had a strong set of Rules of Limitation for my Matrin universe (Diplomacy of Wolves, Vengeance of Dragons, Courage of Falcons, Vincalis the Agitator).

They were.

1. PRIMARY RULE: Magic works well, and with a big enough power source to fuel it, could do everything science and massively advanced technology could do.

3. Magic costs a lot. It can be drawn voluntarily from the (limited, irreplaceable) animata or soul of the caster, which strongly limits its power, but which incurs only a minimal chance of blowback, called rewhah.

4. Or it can be drawn involuntarily from the souls of human sacrifices, which allows for spells to be cast that are limited in strength only by the number of human beings sacrificed to cast them. Since spell-casting incurs a chance of rewhah directly proportional to the amount of power drawn to cast the spell, the chances of rewhah from sacrifice casting is high.

5. Rewah returns to the caster or casters, and causes Scarring, a magical distortion of the caster’s body that alters the caster’s appearance but also his or her genes, resulting in lineages of magically scarred individuals (the origin of the Scarred).

6. For those whose souls have not been burned to cast magic, consciousness survives physical death.

Again, these Rules of Limitation are very strict, and apply only to the single area of the Infinite Universe that I intended to use in every story.

They were not breakable, nor did I ever break them. They were my gravity—and having established throughout each story that when I threw the ball up in the air, it would fall the same way every time, I was then free to move around the rest of my universe, backward and forward in history, with new characters, new stories, new neighborhoods—and the readers who had found a home in one story found broad diversity in others, but also the comfort of knowing how things worked.

Notice that these rules are put together as Primary Rule and rules related to it.

Your Primary Rule is the one that stands alone, the one that affects every other rule you create, but is unchanged by those rules.

In Settled Space, death is final. There is no coming back.

In Matrin, Magic has the power of massively advanced science, and is treated as a science by its practitioners.

When you build your own rules, the Primary Rule is the one around which every story you write will revolve.

Example #1: Every story I write in Settled Space will be powered by the reality that while life and good health can be sustained almost indefinitely through wonderful future tech, death is final—so survival is the urgent, desperate, and driving motivator at all times for people who live in this dangerous universe—and life is both precious and tenuous to those who know this truth.

Example #2: Every story I would write in Matrin would include as its core a magic user or magic users and a conflict caused by the use of this powerful, pervasive, and dangerous magic.

Settled Space is a much better Universe for me and for the stories I write than Matrin. Here’s why:

I want to write stories about life and death, friendship and love, fighting for what’s just and honest and good in a universe filled with people to whom justice, honesty, and goodness mean nothing. I want to write about how the actions of the individual matter. I want to write about the pursuit of dreams, about the value of persistence, about the courage it takes to decide to live your own life, and not one someone else planned for you.

What do you want to write about?

Think about what matters to you personally: your values, your hopes, your dreams, your fears, and your passions.

Think about the sort of story themes you hope to cover. Story themes are things like:

- Good triumphs over evil only if good people stand together.

- The past only seems safe from the perspective of memory.

- Dreams only have value if pursued with action, intent, and a plan.

- Fear is the greatest motivator.

- Get out of the story immediately if someone says, “We should all split up so we can cover the ground faster.”

Think about fictional elements you love to read about and write about. Things like:

- Scientific discoveries

- Mysterious ruins

- Love at first sight

- Dogs, cats, horses or other animals who can talk to each other (or to humans)

- Crime and punishment

- People in danger who must save themselves or die

- Forensic techniques and investigation

- Magic

- The Old West (or other historical periods)

- The future you would like to live in

- And so on…

Your Turn

Go to the Chapter 13 worksheets.

Print out and do the four Finding Your Stories  worksheets. Take your time on these and give your answers your best: What you’re doing is creating a rough draft for your current and future writing career.

When you’re finished, come back here and move on to Rule #2.

Rule #2: There are no other rules.

The point of the Infinite Universe is to give yourself as much elbow room as you can, so that you can write in your universe for as long as you care to without feeling cornered or bored.

So when you establish just those rules that will allow you to create consistent stories in your universe, quit. You’ll notice that in neither of these rule-sets do I mention culture, language, religion, geography, era, or even protagonist species.

If you want to create a Humans In Space Infinite Universe, your obvious first rule is going to be, “All sapient life in the universe is human.”

If you want to create a Streets of New York City Infinite Universe, rule one is going to be “All stories take place within Manhattan and the boroughs.”

If you want to create brilliant fantasy humor with present-day commentary, you begin with, “The world is flat, and rests on four elephants that stand on the back of Atuan, the Great Turtle…” Well, no, you don’t do that, because that’s Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. But it was a damn fine First Rule.

Determining what rules will allow you to establish necessary limitations without trapping yourself in a box takes thought and patience. You have to know both what you’ll have fun writing and how to prevent yourself from going over the top with it and turning your series stupid inside of five books.

Your Turn

You get to the core of your Infinite Universe by asking yourself, “What limitations will prevent me from cheating myself and my readers?”

You have story ideas rolling around in your head—or in all the worlds you’ve already created in this course to reach this point.

So you can either create a new Infinite Universe from scratch.

Or, if you want to pull together some of what you’ve already created, you can take several of your worlds that share elements in common—and that you’d like to expand into connected stories you’d like to keep up with for the rest of your career.

Either way, you’re going to establish Rules of Limitation.

So print out a set of the Rules of Limitation examples and worksheets, and create limits that allow you to tie different places, people, and times together into one coherent whole.

Create at least one Primary Rule of Limitation, and at least two secondary rules dependent on that.

It is entirely possible to create a whole Infinite Universe with one well-thought-out Primary Rule and a handful of secondaries.

What I Got

I’m using my upcoming Longview stories, set in my Infinite Universe Settled Space, for my example here.

So to refresh you on the Settled Space rules:

1. PRIMARY RULE: Dead is dead—you can’t reju a corpse.

2. Space travel across massive distance works by folding distant void areas in space—areas containing no matter and little dark matter—together along natural lines of weakness, and threading the ship through the insertion void and out the extraction void instantaneously.

3. Three origami engines must exist to allow triangulation to, and movement through, origami points, but their distance relative to each other is immaterial.

4. No magic. Science can expand beyond rules currently known and do things currently unimaginable, but everything costs, everything has a knowable origin and knowable properties, and all genuine results are reproducible by anyone with appropriate tools and knowledge.

5. No multiverse access—a multiverse may or may not exist, but its (debatable) existence does not and cannot influence in any way what happens in Settled Space.

For the Longview series, I added one additional rule of limitation.

1. In the Cheryan Pact Worlds, all worlds wishing to receive Pact funds and Pact benefits must outlaw the death penalty, and abide by the Rules of Sentencing for Dangerous Criminals.

Now, the Cheryan Pact Worlds are outside Cadence Drake’s preferred zone of operations. She doesn’t like the Pact, she doesn’t like the rules, and she doesn’t like the governments in this large, well-established system. She has her reasons, and they’re good ones.

But various folks she knows or has known have business there. And one of her acquaintances has acquired an old slow-settlement ship called the Longview, has refurbished it, and is now running the Death Circus route through the Cheryan Pact system as a licensed Death Circus operator.

The Death Circus is the convenient out for Cheryan Pact worlds that do not wish to harbor dangerous criminals—these criminals can be sold to traveling Death Circuses, which then either use them as short-lived entertainment when the Circuses set up outside of the Pact region, or which sell them to buyers who have other uses for dangerous criminals.

The owner of the Longview Death Circus, however, has found an interesting, profitable, and compelling third use for some dangerous criminals. And it is that use—and that story—which I’ll be exploring when I write the six Longview stories.

Decision Point

I strongly recommend that you read the last five chapters of this course once—even if you already know you do not want to engage in complex worldbuilding—because the last five chapters contain useful techniques you may wish to incorporate in some segments of your work.

However…

The remaining chapters, excluding Write Your Sample Story are primarily for…ahem…my people.

The creators of worlds that are characters, the builders of Infinite Universes, and Those Who Would Leave Traces Of the Mysterious Past, or Place Relics Thrown Back From A Far Future Into Their Stories…

The worldbuilder geeks.

And those who would join us.

BUILDING

GEEK DEEP

CHAPTER 14

Delve In The Geek Deeps

Still with me?

Welcome, kin, or kin-to-be. Everything in the previous chapters still stands. Everything in the INTRODUCTION still stands, too, including that mildly hyperbolic session from my local Worldbuilders Anonymous meeting.

This stuff is the sort of fun that hits pleasure centers in your brain otherwise almost impossible to find, it can be wildly addictive, and if, as you are building, you don’t stop when you have what you need right now, you are heading into the danger zone.

Furthermore, it’s very difficult to separate what you need right now from what you might need right now—and might need in the future.

The instant you discover yourself saying “I might use this…”

STOP BUILDING!

And to prove my point about how tempting it is to keep going, if you have Minecraft, you can spend a surprisingly long time exploring the 3-D map of the world I built for The Longview series.

I started out with a concept for seven stories, cut back to six.

Had a clear concept of the spaceship I needed for the series, and started building that.

Got curious about where the ship might dock, and built that.

Considered what the spaceship was doing specifically on the world where I’d built it, and built a tent (not the easiest thing to build in Minecraft, let me tell you) while I was working my way through THAT question.

Got more curious about the people who lived on the world, and ended up building the village, the jail, and the house where the folks in charge live and run things.

Considered what it would be like living in a place like this, and built some escape tunnels.

Built the place where the folks escaped to.

Built a start on the place that the folks who escaped are building.

Because I covered so much territory, built a way to move folks instantly from place to place, and built a story in my head about why each of those little terminals existed while I was building that.

If you’re a worldbuilding geek too, you’ll get how I went from “I need this” to “I might need this in the future” to “I am never going to use this, but DAMN, it was fun to build.”

It is because—even though I know better—I keep building worlds that overrun all reason and purpose that I’ve been kicked out of Worldbuilders Anonymous.

I’m a bad influence.

(No, there really isn’t a Worldbuilders Anonymous, though there probably should be. But even if there were, I’d still be kicked out. I just want to get my habit down to where an I can pass for a normal person. I don’t want to quit.)

Even if you’re not planning on writing in some world structure other than the Infinite Universe, you’ll learn the underlying reasons for building your worlds and universes the way you are in this section—but because of the way I developed the course, you’re going to be building the world you are building the right way already.

There are three minor reasons and one major reason for delving into the Geek-Deeps.

Minor reasons first.

1. You are building a role-playing campaign that is going to run for a long time, (or writing a gaming guide for such a campaign, or building worlds for other writers professionally, or some other variant on this theme).

2. You are writing a series in which the World is a primary character.

3. You are creating Special Physics* for your story, and you need to set down and fully comprehend the rules of your Special Physics to prevent deus ex machina, story stupids, rule spread, and other unfortunate sins of poorly thought-out world design.

————

*If you skipped the Infinite Universes chapter, here is the definition for Special Physics.

Special Physics: An element in worldbuilding in which the way your world works is:

A) different than the way our known world works, and

B) critical to the telling of your story.

One single element of Special Physics will have a cascade of consequences that you will have to deal with consistently throughout however many stories you tell in the world you’re building. Furthermore, Special Physics elements create consequence and frequently conflicts with each other.

Do not create long lists of Special Physics elements. Settle on one or two that you absolutely must have in order to write the stories you want to write (Ordinary people can become wizards, for example), figure out the short- and long-term consequences of each element, and work tightly within those limits.

If you want to get involved with Geek-Deep Worldbuilding, go back and do the Infinite Universes chapter first.

————

The major reason for which I still recommend Geek-Deep Worldbuilding, however, has everything to do with connection.

Deep, sometimes scary, frequently obsessive connection. Connection between you and your characters. Connection between your readers and your characters. Connection between your readers and each other.

Much less frequently—because from the reader’s point of view, too much of you in your work becomes a flaw in your fiction—connection between your readers and you.

You are the creator of a world—but if you’ve done it well, you are essentially invisible to your readers. Your characters are alive, your world is alive, and the sense your readers hold that the entire rest of the place you have created lies just around the corner, and that if your main character had walked left instead of right, they would have seen completely different wonders, sits deep inside your readers’ subconscious minds.

It sits in the back of your mind, too.

And mine. Why did I put that ancient tower on the edge of the square where the Karnee child was executed in the Secret Texts trilogy? Who built it? What was the world of Matrin like when that tower was new? Who lived in that location before the Families and their vendettas, and a thousand years earlier, before Vincalis brought down the Dragons and their civilization?

I don’t know, and there are times when it drives me nuts. I built the damn tower in that square because I was planning on writing in the world of Matrin for the rest of my career, and I wanted to do some of the books in the world’s deep past, exploring the story of the bones of Matrin’s oldest civilization while it still lived. I made a point of calling attention to the tower, of making it an important part of the scene, not because it would be critical in that book, but because it would be critical in some book far down the line that I had not yet even conceived. And now it sits there, a mystery without an answer.

“What lies over the next hill?” is the question that compels readers who love rich worldbuilding to read the next book in a beloved series. They know they haven’t seen everything yet.

You know you haven’t seen everything yet, either—but you also know that in this world of yours, if you don’t explore, nobody will see everything. The only person who can make your world live in all its infinite richness, who can build the Seven Wonders and the Terrifying Past and the Extravagant Present and the Dangerous Future—in whatever way you might conceive them—is you.

Ultimately, you dive into the Geek Deeps to give shape to promise.

First you do it out of curiosity—for the same reason Lewis and Clark set off across the Louisiana Purchase long ago—to find out just what the hell is out there.

Next, you do it for the sheer joy of play—to exercise your mind with logic puzzles: “If I create this ancient tower, then it has a history, and the history stretches deep into my world’s past. So by what means was it built, who built it, and why did it survive practically unscathed when no other traces of the people who made it remain here? What did it do then? What does it do now? What might it do in the future? If I follow from action—the building of the tower for an unknown purpose—to consequence—the existence of an indestructible tower whose builders have vanished—what next action might occur to make the tower something other than a curiosity? To make it a threat, or a salvation?”

And then you do it to simultaneously scratch your reader’s itch…and make it worse. To prove that, yes, there is more that you haven’t seen…and it’s amazing. And to leave the essential details of WHY it is amazing for the next story, or book, or series.

Because the careful reader is going to subconsciously register the detail of that tower. And somewhere inside of him, a small voice will suggest that there is a story to that tower. One he’d really like to know.

One he’d love to know.

So what is the war cry of the Geek Deeps?

“We build for knowledge, for joy, and for love!”

Our readers’ and our own.

Onward.

CHAPTER 15

The Dotty Triangle and the Necessary Questions

If you imagine SANE worldbuilding as a diagram, it starts with a single dot.

That dot is the question that leads you into your story. When it becomes insufficient to propel the story forward, you build another dot, and then another dot, and these dots allow you to expand the story gradually, to maintain control of where it’s going, and to retreat back to the previous question and ask a different one if the story suddenly takes a turn you don’t like.

In Geek-Deep Worldbuilding, you do exactly the opposite of what you did with SANE worldbuilding. You work from largest questions to smallest questions:

- Fairly early in the process you build a map (or several)

- You derive from your map an entire series of broad questions,

- And these questions in turn lead to a shorter series of more specific questions which work their way down to specific places and specific people.

You build more than you'll use in your current book. However, in Geek-Deep Worldbuilding (which is still much more deadline-friendly than Tolkien Worldbuilding, wherein you spend years building your languages and your maps and your cultures and races before you write any fiction) you still build lightly, and you still ask the questions you need to know now, and work out details you need later as you need them.

Your image for this process is the Dotty Triangle, which starts with a map and some broad questions, takes the questions that give you the most interesting answers and pursue them further, and come up with the basics of your world and the place, time, and means by which your story starts at the bottom of the triangle.

In the illustration above, it's important to note that not all of the Dots generate arrows that lead to other Dots. Some questions you ask, and some bits and pieces of world that you create, will not lead any further. Hang on to everything you build anyway, because later in your series, you may see something you put together back when you were writing Book One that gives you the perfect nightmare problem to throw at your characters in Book Ten.

You build a Dotty Triangle for this story…and then you build a Dotty Triangle for the next story. And you build another one for the story after that.

The connections you make each time, the answers that call out to you that they are worth investigating, will change with every story. And the questions you ask that generate these answers will be different with every type of map you make.

But there are some basics you can follow.

Here in the Geek Deeps, you ask the big question first:

What are the absolute outside boundaries of my world or universe?

Remember, a World can contain one story or many. By its definition, a Universe always contains multiple stories which are related by their connection through the universe’s Rules of Limitation.

(See Infinite Universes if you missed Rules of Limitation.)

Until you’ve written a second story connected to your first story exclusively by the shared story physics of the rules of your Universe, you’ve only built a world with Universe potential.

However, if you’re building with intent to commit Infinite Geek-Deep Universe, you’re gonna need a map.

I’ve hand-drawn a lot of planetary maps, a lot of nations and continent maps, a lot of city maps.

There’s software that will do this for you, but I don’t use it—software makes lovely maps, but it doesn’t make lovely mistakes.

And as a storyteller, your strongest ally in coming up with great questions is in making mistakes on your map, in talking to the paper with your hand and your mind, and in seeing within your little wiggles and stray lines the places where stories happen.

In the next chapter, Drawing Story-Filled Maps, I’ll show you how to create maps that actually generate stories and series and characters and more.

Now, though, let’s get back to the Necessary Questions.

The Necessary Questions

Each Necessary Question is one dot on your Dotty Triangle. Not all of your questions or the answers they generate for you will matter right now. Some of them may never matter.

But until you ask and answer them, you cannot know which will give you items of minor interest, and which will give you gold. So you ask ‘em all, and you answer ‘em all. Every time.

The first question, the BIG question, never varies. It is always:

- What are the absolute outside boundaries of my world or universe?

If you’re writing in an Infinite Universe, the answer would seem to be “none,” but it is in fact a bit trickier than that. You can, after all, have an infinite universe set in Paris, France. The boundaries of that universe would be:

Stories set in any time period and location and to any people within the boundaries of Paris, France.

But you can rein it in even tighter than that. Let’s say you don’t want people in present-day France receiving visitors from the past or the future, you don’t want aliens (who, if they’re sapient and volitional, are people, too), you don’t want magic, ghosts, or monsters. Then you get:

Stories set in any time period and location and to any people that correspond to a realistic representation of the boundaries of Paris, France.

Want something bigger? Here’s are my absolute boundaries for Settled Space.

Stories set fifty years before to any time after Isas Yamamoto invented the Origami Drive and humans spread out to the Earth-like and terraformable planets in our galaxy, and to adapt themselves to the planets not suitable for humankind.

The boundaries are simple. A start date, no finish date, our galaxy. FTL (Faster-Than-Light travel via the mechanism of the Origami Drive) works, Rules of Limitation for Settled Space (described earlier) apply.

Give yourself enough elbow room to tell the stories you want to tell, and enough structure to enchant your once and future readers.

The next question is:

- What exists inside those boundaries?

The many answers to this are going to depend on what sort of map you drew; whether it was planetary or local, whether it was in space or undersea, whether it was wilderness or civilization or contained both.

So as subquestions to what exists inside your boundaries, you ask:

- What are my raw resources?

Raw resources are simple enough. Presence or absence of sunlight; presence or absence of day-night cycle, length of day; presence or absence of unlocked oxygen and water; fresh water versus salt water; rainfall, arable land, climate, growing season, harshness of winters; ruggedness of terrain; kinds of plants that can grow to maturity and survive the seasons; kinds of minerals available and how difficult they are to reach.

Each of these elements can vary by region of your Universe. Which means every time you expand into a new chunk of territory, if you are writing in the Geek Deep, you must ask all these questions again. Every territory, every time. If you don’t, you allow yourself to fall into Everyone Shops At My Mall syndrome, where your story world is one dull, uniform experience from one end to the other.

- What are my created/manufactured resources?

Created/manufactured resources are going to be utterly dependent on, and ferociously limited by, your natural list. And if you don’t have it on your first list, you cannot use it to answer your second question and create your second list.

This means that if you posit your folks settling on a moon with no atmosphere, ice-locked subsurface water, and a long day-night cycle because the moon is rotationally locked to the planet it circles, the first things your folks are going to have to manufacture are livable day-night cycles, breathable air, free water, and a protective homeostatic temperature regulator. Think dome. And think it fast.

Conversely, if you drop your original settlers on a largish tropical island where fruit grows on trees year round and drops to the ground without any effort needing to be expended the instant it is ripe; where fluffy wild bunnies and meaty flightless birds breed at a steady pace; where the waterfalls are plentiful and come from lovely, sparkling-water springs at the tops of volcanic mountains that haven’t erupted in thousands of years; and, where the rains are warm and gentle, the only manufacturing you’re likely to get is in the realm of decorative grass skirts and the occasional back-scratcher.

Even fire is going to be an interesting novelty, not a life-saving tool—something the locals break out when they get sick of fruit and decide to try their hands at bunny-on-a-stick. Or roast of next-door neighbor.

- What are the coveted/rare resources?

The answer to this question is always the same in format, though in specifics it should be different each time asked. Rare/coveted resources are what you decide to make them. But you have to have a reason, and your reason has to be good.

Here’s an example. You could decide that iodine could be worth a pound of gold per ounce. But if you did, you would have to figure out why—because iodine is an utterly ignorable commodity in all the places in the world where it occurs naturally. Which are also the only places that have access to it.

Iodine (in the form of iodide) is a relatively rare water-soluble chemical, found naturally in oceans and brine, and in fish and other saltwater creatures.

Its presence in foods prevents mental disabilities and goiter, among other things.

So where would iodine be worth more than its weight in gold? In landlocked regions of the world, especially in those surrounded on all sides by unfriendly or dangerous nations through which traders would have to move to bring in iodine-rich foods, salts, and other cures.

- What are unknown/unsuspected resources?

This is Spiffy Presents For Fiction Writers time. While you’re developing the part of the universe you’re working on, you drop in one cool thing no one has discovered yet. It can be right out in plain sight, or it can be hidden just above the magma layer in the planet’s core (if one exists). Up to you. You decide when you put it in there what it can do. Leaves on a tree that, when burned or eaten, make the ingester telepathic?

A mineral that prevents conception by simple contact with the skin (an infertility bracelet, easily removable and with a short half-life following removal, could make many families’ lives around any world easier).

Water from a natural spring that includes microbacilli that reverse aging—great except there is no way to remove the microbacilli from this one spring, to preserve them, or to transport them in viable fashion. To get the benefits of the spring, you have to sit by the spring and drink the water there. (I know the Fountain of Youth has been done. It’s still a cool idea.)

- What defines the area’s wealth?

(Don’t say ‘gold’ don’t say ‘gold’ don’t say ‘gold…)

Did you say ‘gold?’

Gold is not wealth. Gold is a semi-convenient mechanism for conceptualizing, standardizing, and transferring wealth. But gold is not wealth.

Put yourself in this situation:

You are one of a thousand people on an island where all the crops have just been wiped out, and all the herds are dead. At the same time, the island is sealed off from the rest of the universe. (Why? Dunno. That’s part of the story YOU have to figure out.)

In any case, there is no way on or off the island. EVER.

Of the 1000 people on the island, 500 people have enough canned goods between them to feed everyone on the island through the next growing season.

20 people have shore-fishing nets and know how to use them.

1 guy has a deep-sea fishing boat with deep-sea commercial fishing gear.

3 people are millionaires with all their wealth stored in the forms of gold bullion, pretty pictures, and big houses.

1 guy has five tons of a wide variety of hermetically sealed crop seeds, and the knowledge of how to plant, rotate, and harvest crops, including how to do high-yield, small-space planting, and how to recoup and store crop seed.

Who are the richest people on the island, and why? (To eliminate the “thug government” outcome—where criminals have guns and the innocent are disarmed, so that when bad things happen, the criminals use their guns to loot the helpless and take control—for this test case, everyone is equally armed, equally willing to defend self and property, and therefore no one will be robbed or coerced.)

Back to who is rich once the rules change.

Seriously. Who is the richest person on the island? Who is the second richest? Who are the old and new poor? Think this through and write your conclusions, plus your reasoning on how you reached them. I’ll wait.

Discussing “Who’s Rich Now?”

First, let’s look at the three gold-rich fancy-house millionaires. How are they going to do? Are they going to buy all the canned food and then sell it back to everyone else at wildly inflated prices?

Not so much. Think hard about this, because this is where you figure out what really matters in your characters’ worlds.

Gold may have tremendous value in our world, but it’s only because everyone has agreed to believe it has. It’s a pretty metal, you can pound it into interesting shapes, and it doesn’t corrode…but you can’t eat it, you can’t drink it, and if there are a thousand people on an island that just got cut off from the universe forever AND lost all its crops at once, the question of what to eat and what to drink is going to pre-empt the consensus value of heavy, shiny dust-collectors.

There will be some folks who get suckered early in the game and trade their cans of food for gold.

But the smarter folks are going to look at the men bearing gold and say, “How hungry are you, bud? My price is a hundred gold a can. (Or a thousand. Or ten thousand) Or a trade value of one fresh fish. Don’t like my price? Then you’re not hungry enough yet.”

Meanwhile, the folks who immediately catch on to the fact that food has become the new currency—by virtue of both its scarcity and its eat-or-die survival value—are going to sort themselves into a list of haves and have-nots:

- Those who have nothing, and are going to have to figure out something that they can offer to those who do;

- Those who have limited supplies of stored food (which gives them the temporary but ephemeral power wielded by attractive young women);

- Those who can produce food, either by hunting, fishing, or planting (who will become the primary core of the new economy, upon whom the success or failure of all other endeavors live or die;

- And those who can provide replenishable food futures, in the form of stored, plantable seed, and live-stored meat (fish farms and animal breeding operations).

The guy with the commercial fishing boat is only good to go as long as the fuel for his boat holds out. On an island with only 1000 people, native petroleum or the skills and machinery to acquire and refine it are unlikely. Someone might eventually make biofuel from spare crops, trash, or something else the island has—but that’s well into the future, once the inhabitants have taken care of their short-term problems of making food and developing ways to store it. If the commercial fisherman’s running diesel, he’s a short-term provider who’s going to run out of future pretty quickly. If he has a sailing rig and a loyal crew, on the other hand, he stands to become rich in every way that counts.

The guy with the stored seeds can build an army, doing it the same way feudal kings of yore did: Build outward in a concentric circle from his own home base, gathering the have-nots, the canned-good people, and even the other food producers, with the following promises:

- If you have no food, I will provide you with food now and in the future in exchange for your work planting and harvesting food now and in the future. As long as you work for me, you and those you love will not starve. (Hi, serfs.)

- If you have canned goods (which will soon run out), if you give a percentage to me now so that I can feed those with nothing, I will give you someone to plant your crops this year, so that you can live an easier life—and perhaps in that year you can think of some other service you can provide to win my favor so you can keep your personal crop-planter. (Hi, future serfs, service providers, and perhaps merchants.)

- If you fish from the shores, I will give you a place in my council, as well as planters and harvesters of your own to provide food for your tables, in exchange for a portion of every catch that will allow me to put meat on the tables of my people. (Hi, merchants and future gentry.)

A guy who builds (or owns) a fish-breeding farm will be able to rise high in wealth and power. He and the guy with the seeds would do well to become allies.

Once you’ve defined wealth, one category question remains:

- Who uses the land and the resources, and how do they use them?

And from your determination of your resources, you then ask:

- Who gathers the resources?

- Who buys them, with what, and for how much?

- Who creates with them?

- What artifacts do they create, and why do they create?

- Who destroys with them?

- What do they destroy, and why do they destroy?

Following that, you ask one of the tougher questions anyone ever asks:

- In what ways does specific ongoing creation lead to destruction?

And to give you an example of creative destruction out of everyday reality, the developments of e-readers, ebooks, internet news, and a plugged-in society (plus some awful manufacturing laws that started to destroy the profitability of old-school “build writers over time” publishing in the 1970s) have led to the shutdown of many newspapers, failing numbers for big-media news programs, the end of a number of smaller publishers, the closings of many brick-and-mortar bookstores…and to a whole lot of journalists losing their jobs. People are discovering that while paper is cool for some books, in general it is a heavy, space-wasting, dust-collecting pain in the keister. And where news is concerned, instant beats the crap out of “news at eleven.”

As a result of inexpensive, readily available high-quality digital media, current job rankings put the job of journalist in the #1 spot for Folks With The Worst Job Prospects. (This is, in fact, the reason my main character in my Knowable Universe example is a journalist.)

Here’s the flip-side question:

- In what ways does destruction make room for creation?

We’re going to drop back to the Middle Ages and the guild systems that restricted everything knowable to those who knew, plus the handful of apprentices they took on to pass on this knowledge. Sharing guild secrets outside of guild members was absolutely forbidden. This system protected jobs. It also absolutely killed innovation, because the guy who tried to figure out a faster way to knit mass quantities of fabric, for example, would threaten the jobs of every guy (and yes, back then hand-knitting was man’s work) in the guild.

So follow guilds and their closed systems of secret and perilously fragile knowledge with the plagues that swept across Europe, devouring knowledge as it wiped out guilds.

Much that was known died during the plagues.

What came back did so because of scattered survivors, and the systematic recording and storing of such knowledge as could be obtained by Catholic monks.

And when the Renaissance began, knowledge managed to creep its way out of the closed fists of guilds.

It wasn’t until the beginning of the Industrial Age that people started understanding that there were enormous benefits to mass production of food and goods, and even today there are some groups that maintain guild systems (or continue to attempt to create them), locking away knowledge and the skills that knowledge confers only to those within the inner circle.

But the inner circle is breaking, and because of the Information Age technology that was born out of Industrial Age vision, you can learn how to do all sorts of things that were treated as accessible occupations only for guild/union members and/or licensed practitioners only a generation ago.

Commercial publishing of literature is a guild system. As long as commercial publishers owned distribution, they also owned the industry.

Same with commercial music publishing, same with commercial movie publishing.

Indie publishing—in all three industries—is an open system.

Once the person who owns knowledge and uses it to create is also the person who distributes either the creations built from his knowledge—or the knowledge itself—markets open up and knowledge expands.

Online, you can now learn how to fix your own toilet, how to build a business, how to play a guitar, how to repair a roof, how to invest money, how to locate a missing relative, how to cook a dinner worthy of a chef. You can buy courses that will give you solid, usable skills that will allow you to earn the money that can make your life better, easier, and less stressful.

And you can create courses using what you know that will allow you to teach what you know to others.

For this, you have to take a moment to thank all those people throughout history who fought guild systems for the freedom to learn, and those rebels who defied guild systems to teach what they knew outside of closed systems.

Your Turn

Print off and your Geek Deeps Necessary Questions worksheets.

At this point you can either do the worksheets, or move onto the next chapter, build your first map, and then use the map as a prompt for working through the Necessary Questions.

Your map will give you a short story, a novella, a novel, or a series—whichever you choose. Or all of the above.

It's not how you draw it, after all.

It's how you think while you draw it.

This requires zero artistic talent. It does require a non-erasable pen.

And one sheet of paper. Any size from printer paper up will do.

CHAPTER 16

Designing Story-Filled Maps

I love maps as much as I love cookies. Sometimes I love them more…because I can have maps.

When I was nine through ten years old, we lived four miles northwest of the village of Kwethluk, Alaska, in a place accessible in the summer only by boat or Cessna outfitted with pontoons, (or by Army helicopter, but that’s another story), and in the winter by truck or snowmobile after the river had frozen to a depth of maybe two feet. The ice would be six feet thick in most places by the time breakup rolled around in the spring, but once it was two feet thick, you weren’t quite so likely to drop a truck or snowmobile through the ice into the deadly water and die. It still happened, because air pockets could form anywhere, and if you hit one, you were going in, and you would not get out. It was the simple reality of the place.

We were about fifty miles from Bethel, which was the only town of substance around, and more than six hundred miles from Anchorage. We were closer to Russia.

I knew all of this because my father had taped enormous topographical maps on the wall of his office, and because I was curious, he showed me how to read them. I could see every building in our mission compound, every house in Kwethluk, the undulating shapes of the tundra, the looping Ss of the Kwethluk River, the places where the river had cut away so sharply at its banks that it had worn clear through the middle points, leaving dead C-shaped lakes behind it. I got a sense of the age of this place from those scars of the river’s passing. I got a sense of the size of a wild world from standing atop Blueberry Hill and seeing the Three-Step Mountains to our north, and knowing they were more than a hundred miles away.

I knew that there were bears and caribou, wolves and ptarmigan between me and those mountains, and damn few people. I knew that if I got lost alone on the tundra, I would die. I could see, looking at those topographical maps, why I would die.

I loved them because they told me what was true in a language I could speak.

World Maps

Here’s the thing. I love to read series fiction, and from the very beginning, series fiction was what I wanted to write. And I had read a lot of it, in a number of genres. In the fronts of many of the books I loved were maps—and I loved maps, too. Marriage made in heaven, I thought.

And from the writing perspective, it was.

My process, when I got serious and started working on fantasy and science fiction, started out with making myself a big piece of paper by taping together the back sides of from six to nine pieces of typing paper—and I know of writers who have done maps that cover whole floors, so I’m a bit of a miser in this regard. But I’ve always lived in small houses with storage issues, so all my maps had to fit rolled up inside architect’s tubes.

I used architects’ pens of varying thicknesses. And I started with a dot. Wrote a name by the dot. Drew a line. Drew another dot. Did some squiggles that represented lakes and rivers and coasts, some inverted Vs for mountains, some cumulus-shaped tree-symbols for forests.

In Arhel, I drew a line around the island of Arhel, and named it Delmuirie’s Barrier. And then I did a detail map of Ariss, the white city on the hill, and drew it with a compass, in concentric rings, like an archery target. And then I drew a line right down the middle, and turned that into a highway, with walls on either side.

I had no idea what these features meant. No plan for them. I simply put them there, knowing that they were questions.

In Matrin, the world of The Secret Texts, I laid out the land masses, but uncharacteristically (for me) I did it in pencil. Either I couldn’t find my pens, or they had dried out—I don’t remember which at this point.

But when I got the land masses roughed in, I stood back and looked at the thing, and wasn’t satisfied. It was too…plain.

So I got out my compass and drew circles of various sizes in a random fashion all over the planet in pencil.

Then, with a ball-point pen, I very carefully carved shorelines around the whole world, building those circles into the terrain as craters and chunks chewed out of the land masses.

Again, when I drew them, I had no plan for them, no explanation of what caused them in my mind. I built the map first, and let those gigantic bite marks germinate.

For Korre, the world of Talyn and Hawkspar, I drew in my main landmasses, and the map again looked boring.

The ocean was vast. It needed some fancying up, I decided. So I imagined what sort of an impact trail something big would make if it hit a landmass in the center of that ocean at a shallow angle and blasted the landmass into smithereens, shooting piles of debris out from its strike zone, and burying its solid core deep in the ocean.

That trail of debris became the Dragon Sea…and I still don’t know what hit. I’m hoping to find out when I write Redbird. If I don’t, I may have to do other books in the same world, just to get some peace of mind about that particular world feature.

I learned as I went. I started leaving a lot of white space on my world maps early on. I realized that discovering everything all at once would be dull—that I wanted to discover new places as I wrote. These parts of the world might be inhabited or uninhabited, but they were a mystery to me, a place for me to invent as I worked my way through my story.

So now we move on to how you do this.

The Concepts Behind World Maps in Geek-Deep Worldbuilding

I said this above, but you might not have caught it, so I’ll bring it back, and then expand on it.

Maps drawn by fiction writers doing geek-deep worldbuilding do not exist to tell the writer where things are. (Though that is a nice secondary function once you’ve hit book two, or book fifteen).

Maps in geek-deep worldbuilding exist to ask the writer questions. If you look at your map as you’re creating it and you don’t have questions racing through your head, you’re drawing the wrong map.

So before we go any farther, let's define "map."

- A map is not a picture of locations and roads.

- A map is not the floor-plan of the inside of a house, or the layout of a town.

- A map is not a star chart.

- A map is not a genealogy table.

All of these things can be maps, but they do not define "Map."

What is a map?

A map is a collection of Dots and Lines that demonstrate relationships.

You can download

Every single element on every single map ever made since the dawn of humankind, without exception, consists of Dots (Look at THIS!) and Lines (Things on this side of the line are different than things on that side of the line.)

You've built Dot worlds.

You've built Line Worlds. You already understand how these work, so you already have experience behind you in using the elements of this process.

So right now, in your notebook, on plain sheet of paper—or if you’re disabled, by opening up a new document in your word processor, create your first, very ugly map.

1. Create a Dot by filling in a tiny black circle. (Enter a period. Or a full stop. Or create List Item #1: Dot.)

2. Draw a Line. (Type ten hyphens. Or Ten underscores. Or create List Item #2: Line.)

3. Put a Dot on the other side of the line. (Or type a second period. Or another full stop. Or create List Item #3: Dot.)

Done? You've drawn a basic map.

Do not dare utter the words "I can't draw" while going through this section.

"Pretty" has absolutely nothing to do with making maps you as the writer can use. All the drawing skills you need, you just demonstrated. Onward.

Here’s the terminology you’ll need to know and understand to be able to build and use your own Geek-Deep World Map. I’m going to be referring back to Container Universes for some of this terminology, so if you skipped straight to this chapter, or skipped that one, go back and read it first. Otherwise you’re going to get lost.

The Essential Terminology

The Essential Terminology includes introductory Geek-Deep videos and worksheets that demonstrate how to use the elements mentioned.

http://howtothinksideways.com/classrooms/create-a-world-clinic-class/create-a-world-clinic-course/cawc-basic-worldbuilding-demo-videos-1-5/

Read the definitions and explanations below, then view each video, and take the time to print out and use the accompanying worksheets before moving on.

- Set: A type of container—in this case, usually a container within other containers. (See the Container Universes chapter for a refresher.)

From a worldbuilding perspective, a set is any location in the story for which you have established a distinct form and a use (Examples: engine room in which characters work, prairie that characters traverse, hotel room in which characters hide,) which can contain one or more characters, and in which action and conflict take place.

VIDEO & WORKSHEETS:
http://howtothinksideways.com/classrooms/create-a-world-clinic-class/create-a-world-clinic-course/cawc-basic-worldbuilding-demo-videos-1-5/#setdemo

- Core point: A type of Container Universe. (See Container Universes) Any well-developed cluster of sets used repeatedly in your series.

Depending on what sort of fiction you’re writing, your core point could be a neighborhood; a big spaceship with hundreds or thousands of people on it; a town or city; or a federation of planets.

Your core point has unique characteristics and features, and includes unique characters—and these are what make it the place you have chosen to map. But for you to build an Infinite Universe rather than a Container Universe, you have to start imagining (and mapping) other points that share essential elements with your core point. While you're at it, you also map the pass-throughs to these other points.

The essential concept of the core point is as follows: “This is my ____. [town|spaceship|yacht|federation of planets] There are many like it, but this one is mine.*”
(*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifleman's_Creed)

The worksheets for this will walk you through the building of the critical parts of your core point.
VIDEO & WORKSHEETS
http://howtothinksideways.com/classrooms/create-a-world-clinic-class/create-a-world-clinic-course/cawc-basic-worldbuilding-demo-videos-1-5/#corepointdemo

- Pass-through: The route you establish through which characters and objects enter and exit your container universe.

Understanding the nature and rules of your pass-through are essential for creating universes that don’t leak. Worksheets for this will help you get that understanding.

VIDEO & WORKSHEETS:
http://howtothinksideways.com/classrooms/create-a-world-clinic-class/create-a-world-clinic-course/cawc-basic-worldbuilding-demo-videos-1-5/#passthroughdemo

- Secondary point: A container universe that shares essential characteristics with your Core Point.

Examples: another town, spaceship, yacht, federation of planets.

The video and worksheets here will help you understand why your core point is not just another secondary point...and what elements within your secondary points are necessary to your story.

VIDEO & WORKSHEETS:
http://howtothinksideways.com/classrooms/create-a-world-clinic-class/create-a-world-clinic-course/cawc-basic-worldbuilding-demo-videos-1-5/#secondarypointvideo

- Disposable point: A core point or secondary point that will be destroyed and not reused.

If you’re one of those writers who does not mind making big messes and breaking the occasional reader’s heart, core points can become disposable. (SPOILER ALERT: The Hope’s Reward, Cady’s first spaceship in Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood, is an example of a core point that becomes a disposable point.)

You already have the worksheets for this one.

VIDEO:
http://howtothinksideways.com/classrooms/create-a-world-clinic-class/create-a-world-clinic-course/cawc-basic-worldbuilding-demo-videos-1-5/#disposablepointdemo

- White space: An area on a map in which no details (other than, if you choose, point names) have been added.

I have discovered over the years that white space is the catalyst for creating Infinite Universes that live in your reader’s mind. White space is what gives your stories the hint of lands unexplored, characters promised but unmet, wonders out there but as yet unseen. White space is three different kinds of “nothing, with names,” and it kicks ass.

VIDEO & WORKSHEETS:
http://howtothinksideways.com/classrooms/create-a-world-clinic-class/create-a-world-clinic-course/cawc-basic-worldbuilding-demo-videos-6-11/#whitespacedemo

- Point name: A name beside a dot somewhere in the middle of white space.

Identifies an area for future stories. The name is what creates the magic.

Example: If I’m writing about my main character waiting for a friend coming ashore from a ship arriving in Beyltaak, (Korre stories), I’ll casually toss in a mention from a disembarking crewman to a dockworker that he didn’t think they were going to get past cannibals pursuing them through the Path of Stars. My main character overhears the conversation. This conversation, however, does not relate to the story I’m writing. So aside from a polite inquiry about the trip when her friend disembarks, something along the lines of…

“You ran into cannibals?”

“We lost our wind briefly, and I didn’t think we were going to escape.” And a shrug. “But that’s the Path of Stars.”

…It never gets mentioned again. In this book.

But I’ve put it out there. There is a Path of Stars (such a nice name) filled with cannibals (so probably not such a nice place), and my readers will think Somewhere in this world there are cannibals.

Which is, at the moment, all I'm looking for. That extra little hook beneath my reader's skin.

In a book down the line, I’ll put a main character on a ship that has to go through the Path of Stars, and at that point, I’ll bring back the cannibals.

Show the gun, shoot the gun: The same writing rule applies here as with guns—if you show the cannibals, you have to shoot the cannibals, metaphorically speaking. You just don't necessarily have to shoot them in the same book in which you originally show them. When I write about them, I’ll build out just the places I actually use—and that part of my map will no longer be white space.

VIDEO & WORKSHEETS:
http://howtothinksideways.com/classrooms/create-a-world-clinic-class/create-a-world-clinic-course/cawc-basic-worldbuilding-demo-videos-6-11/#pointnamedemo

- Question generator: A set or cluster of sets built out in light-to-complex detail, with many points which the writer can use to give his subconscious mind toys to explore and try out.

Your question generator can act as one or more of the three following types: A Character Generator, a Plot Generator, and/or a Conflict Generator.

All maps act as question generators, but your core points must act as all three kinds.

VIDEO & WORKSHEETS:
http://howtothinksideways.com/classrooms/create-a-world-clinic-class/create-a-world-clinic-course/cawc-basic-worldbuilding-demo-videos-6-11/#questiondemo

Question Generators, and How To Use Them

I’m going to walk you through all three types of Question Generators individually. To do this, I’ll use a tiny example from my Longview series core point map, the Longview itself.

Here’s a very short description of one portion of that map.

The Longview is an enormous spaceship which has within one section of its hull thousands upon thousands of locked, sealed, modified Medixes (reju units) hooked up to a complicated computer system, with that computer connected to a massive floating sphere at the back of the ship.

SHORT DEFINITIONS:

Character Generators trigger your subconscious mind to create questions that give you both new groups or classes of characters (crew members, passengers, and stowaways, for example), as well as new individual characters in these classes.

VIDEO:
http://howtothinksideways.com/classrooms/create-a-world-clinic-class/create-a-world-clinic-course/cawc-basic-worldbuilding-demo-videos-6-11/#characterdemo

Plot Generators trigger your subconscious mind to create questions that give you new scene, story, and series ideas.

VIDEO:
http://howtothinksideways.com/classrooms/create-a-world-clinic-class/create-a-world-clinic-course/cawc-basic-worldbuilding-demo-videos-6-11/#plotdemo

Conflict Generators trigger your subconscious mind to create questions that give your characters new struggles to overcome, and new ways to make those struggles more difficult, more dangerous, or more interesting, as well as making those struggles more fun for you to write, and more compelling for your readers to read.

VIDEO:
http://howtothinksideways.com/classrooms/create-a-world-clinic-class/create-a-world-clinic-course/cawc-basic-worldbuilding-demo-videos-6-11/#conflictdemo

The following images are from inside the spaceship in my Minecraft Map Longview.

If you have Minecraft, you can download this and the other Minecraft maps I reference in this course, and walk through them to see how I’ve put them together, and what questions I’ve asked myself within them.

The Minecraft maps are available here (remember to log in first):

The giant spaceship within the Longview world generates the following Character Generator questions—

General Character Questions, which affect ALL characters:

- Who has contact with this area of the ship?

- How do the basic types of people in contact with this section of the ship differ: For example, who’s locked inside the reju units, vs. who’s outside of the reju units, and what difference determines people who are free from people who are sealed inside?

- Who knows what the sphere and the odd computer set-up do, vs. who doesn’t?

Individual Character Questions, which affect only one character:

- How does this element [being associated with this section of the Longview in whatever fashion he or she is] affect what the character thinks?

- How does this element affect what the character says?

- How does this element affect what the character does?

IMPORTANT: The instant you worldbuild an individual character generator beyond the point where it adds NEW changes to how your element affects what the character thinks, says, or does, you are overbuilding. Stop.

This location within the Longview generates the following Plot Generator questions:

- Why is the ship full of modified reju units?

- Why are they modified?

- Why is there a gigantic floating light-filled sphere at the back of the ship?

- What does the sphere do?

- What does the computer network do?

- What do the reju units do?

- What activities does the ship carry out that require such bizarre equipment?

- Where does this ship take its cargo?

- How does the ship acquire new cargo?

VIDEO & WORKSHEETS:
http://howtothinksideways.com/classrooms/create-a-world-clinic-class/create-a-world-clinic-course/cawc-basic-worldbuilding-demo-videos-6-11/#plotdemo

This location within the Longview generates the following Conflict Generator questions:

- How do the crew react to passengers in the reju-unit portion of the ship, and how do passengers react to the present of the reju section of the ship?

- How much do crew members know about the contents of the reju units?

- What would they do if they knew more?

- What dangers does the business of the ship pose to the crew?

- What dangers does the business of the ship pose to passengers?

- What dangers does the business of the ship pose to the contents of the reju units?

VIDEO & WORKSHEETS:
http://howtothinksideways.com/classrooms/create-a-world-clinic-class/create-a-world-clinic-course/cawc-basic-worldbuilding-demo-videos-6-11/#conflictdemo

With these example questions in mind, it’s time for us to move onto working on a practice map.

The Practice Map

I did a demo map below (using iDraw—a vector tool—and a cursor, which is why the lines are so neat). My hand-drawn maps are messier. They also have better mistakes. But this will do.

This map consists of Dots, Lines, and Point Names. It's very simple. Please note that the map has no key, which is a critical part of any finished map. This is because this map is not finished. You're going to finish it, and then make your own key on your worksheets.

A map key, if you’ve never done any mapping, is the section in one corner of the map where you get the details of how far things are from each other, and what the different sorts of lines mean.

For example:

- - - - - -  =  Electric Fence, or Brick Wall, or Border

.  .  .  .  .  =  Small Moon Trajectory or Zombie Crossing

And so on.

Consider this exercise Mapping for Story 101.

To make this map, I placed dots first. Then I drew lines connecting them, and lines around them.

Once I had an interesting tangle of spaghetti and meatballs on the page, I started attaching names to things; I handed this task over to my subconscious mind, which likes coming up with names, but which was clearly chewing on unpleasant thoughts while we were doing this exercise. My conscious mind then took the names, decided which needed to be in big letters and which needed to be in little letters.

And then I stopped, so you'd have something to work with.

One thing I've learned from years of mapping is this: When you're creating a map for fiction, draw your key last.

This is no doubt a concept that would horrify any real mapmaker, but let me tell you why—for writers—deciding what the symbols mean needs to come after drawing symbols on the page.

When you're drawing, your conscious and subconscious minds have not yet explored all your options for line colors, line forms (solid, dotted, dashed, etc.), geometric shapes, and so on. When you're mapping, you might not yet even know what type of world you're on.

If you're drawing circles with a compass, you may not have any idea whether those circles are going to be the outbreak points for a slow-virus infection, town boundaries for folks with scary geometry issues, or in my case, craters left by a magic war that led to the fall of a civilization.

Don't decide what your lines, dots, and symbols mean until you get everything on paper, and have a chance to run the map through the grinder of your necessary questions.

So now you have a very plain starter map. I'll note that on this starter map, I can figure out ways to make a map of space, a map of planets in a solar system, a map of a world, a continent, and neighboring towns in two counties, and to use it in every genre I write in except YA—the name Hellforge would probably raise some eyebrows and garner a request for a nice name from a commercial publisher—as well as Westerns, romance, erotica, mixes of the above within critical boundaries, and literary stories.

It's not a complex enough map (yet) to generate a whole career, but it is primarily white space, so it does have infinite room for expansion.

So let me walk you through the numbers, and then send you off to get some practice.

#1 is the core point. This point needs to be developed with a complete set of necessary questions with answers. Look for answers in your necessary questions that suggest good question generators for you to use. See Core Point Demo in videos.

Optional starter question: How did Chalk Cross get its name?

#2 is a secondary point. This point needs compare-and-contrast-type questions, which you can get by digging through your core point answers, and figuring out how the secondary point is different. See Secondary Point Demo in videos.

Optional starter question: Why does the line connect to the dead-end of Ende?

#3 and #4 are question generators. Your mileage may vary on whether either or both of these create interesting questions for you (hit them with such necessary questions as you find relevant), but the Barking Line is driving me nuts and has been since my subconscious mind tossed that name into the ring and my conscious mind had to figure out where to put it. The line it's on, you'll notice, is a dotted line, which does not mean the same thing as a dashed line…and I don't know what, in this instance, it means.

I have no room for more stories right now. Just writing this book has given me enough new ideas that I could keep myself at full-speed production in just fiction for the next few years without looking at any of my existing projects. You're probably facing the same dilemma yourself right about now. But…dammit. The Barking Line… See Question Generator Demo in videos.

#5 is a classic Line as defined all the way back in World #2: The Line World. It divides Kressfallow from Hellforge. It does this because the dividing line that separates two places exists not because a geographical feature is there, but because two groups of people with differing ideas wanted a convenient marker to keep the folks with wrong ideas on one side, and the folks with right ideas on the other side.

So the interesting question to ask here is not "How is the terrain different on one side of the line than on the other?" It is "How are the people different?" See Plot/Character Generator Demo in videos.

Optional starter question: Is there any relationship between the name Hellforge and the area marked Ruined Ground?

#6 and #7 are white space with point names. They're there for you when you want to toss in comments to put into later stories.

Examples: "Just heard there's a ______ that killed a bunch of people in Dead Fork. Glad we didn't take the work down there."

"You know she and her brother are from Hellforge. You can see it in their eyes."

When you’ve finished, create your key. Draw a solid line, and beside it write what that solid line stands for, whether it’s roads or rivers or wormholes in space.

Draw a dashed line, and beside it, write what that stands for, whether it’s a national border or a boundary for poisoned land, or one side the area of space (or water) where monsters dwell.

Draw a dotted line, and beside that write in whatever you’ve decided the dotted line stands for, from the outlines of the indentation in the ground of an ancient and haunted ruin to the path a group of fanatics follow while running naked and barking like dogs to celebrate the Rising of the Purple Moon once every two hundred years.

Your Turn

Print out the unfinished demo map and the worksheet that follows it, and answer the map questions.

When you’re finished, come back here to move on to creating your own map.

Your Turn

Time To Draw Your Geographic Map

You need:

- A non-erasable pen. A ballpoint pen will do fine.

- A single sheet of notebook-sized paper. Printer paper or lined notebook paper will do fine.

- No excuses.

Drawing

Step 1: Draw seven Dots of varying sized anywhere on your paper.

Step 2: Draw two solid lines.

Step 3: Draw one dotted line.

Step 4: Draw one dashed line.

Step 5: Draw one geometric shape of any size.

Naming

Step 1: Name four of your dots.

Step 2: Name your dotted line.

Step 3: Name the space inside your geometric shape.

Map Questions

Q1: Find a place on the map where you made a mistake—a lopsided geometric, a stray line, a place where you wanted to erase but couldn't. This place on the line represents something important—something secret. What is the secret?

Q2: Do any of your lines cross? Give each point where they cross a name. What makes the first crossing your named special? What goes on there?

Q3: Look at the areas to either side of your dashed line? How are these areas different? How does this difference show you what is different about the people on each side of the line?

Q4: The dotted line is mysterious. What is its mystery?

Now go back and name the rest of your dots. Give your solid lines names. Ask yourself questions as you're writing the names, and write the questions down. You don't have to answer them yet, but you need to ask them.

Select one point of what is, right now, all white space, and designate that point your core point.

What makes it special?

Name three people who live there. How is each of them different than the other two, and what is their primary conflict, generated by a second point on your map, that causes them conflict?

Select that conflict-causing point, and make it your secondary point.

Work back and forth between drawing your map and asking yourself questions about it until you have enough material to write the first scene of a story.

Write that scene.

It's now time to take a look at the kinds of maps you'll use in building your worlds.

The Maps Worldbuilders Use

You have a variety of Dot and Line objects you can create that will function for you as maps, but which are not what non-writers would call maps.

These include geographical maps at the continental scale (the classic front-of-the-book maps in Tolkien worldbuilding) and their location-oriented brethren, town maps, topographical maps, star charts, etc. Plus things non-writers will tell you are not maps: floor plans, genealogy tables, timelines, archeological dig diagrams, and such other items as you invent to keep track of who, what, when, and where in your personal universe.

The Classic Geographic Map

The image below is a section of my world map of Korre, the home of my novels Talyn, Hawkspar, and the coming-eventually third book, Redbird.

In this image, I have included the Islands of the Fallen Sun, the locale of that largish chunk of land that took a direct but shallow hit from an object from space. I’ve also chosen to show Hyre, which is the starting point for the first book in the series, Talyn.

This is a simple outline map, full of white space and point names, and nothing else.

Following the system I’m teaching you, I then chose one area of the map, the island of Hyre, to expand.

Hyre is at the bottom left of this section of the world map, and is smallish. It is a tiny region of my globe to cause such world-shaking events.

Now the detail map of Hyre.

This map shows my core point (not readable here, but readable in the classroom download of this map), Beyltaak, Talyn av Tirsha’s home, and the starting location of her story. The map also shows other important points in the story.

But you have to understand that when I drew this map, I didn’t know what my story was going to be, or who was going to be in it. This map is the physical representation of me asking myself questions.

There is no chicken-and-egg question here. The world map came first, the Hyre detail map came second, and the story emerged as my hand made lines and my mind asked questions.

And even the Hyre map is mostly white space. It has some point names and pass-throughs, an area of contested ground between the Confederacy of Western Hyre and the Eastil Republic (note the differing and incompatible political systems implied by the names), borders where I tossed in names of countries on the continents above and below Hyre.

But I did what you’ll do.

In coming up with my story, I asked myself the same necessary questions you’ll ask yourself about each of your maps: what resources were in contention, who had the harbors, who had the roads, who owned the high ground (both sides, which is why the damn war had already dragged on for 500 years when the story started), and so on. I asked myself what they were using to fight the war.

I asked myself why that wacky splash pattern in the middle of my world map mattered (because if it wasn’t the critical element that tied my whole series together, there was absolutely no reason to dump something that gaudy into the picture in the first place).

And once I had those questions, I asked myself whose life all my story conflict affected most.

Talyn was my answer. Lucky woman.

Geographical maps are question generators of the first order for character, plot, and conflict. I love them.

You’ve already gone through the instructions for making your own geographical maps, so I won’t duplicate the instructions here.

Timeline Maps

Below is a very small portion of my timeline map for The Secret Texts, a trilogy that takes place on the world of Matrin (cannot find that map right now or it would be here; if I do find it, I’ll add it to the Create A World Clinic Expansion downloads.)

A timeline is the arrangement of when and the white space that lies between all written events. To use a timeline effectively to map your characters’ and conflicts’ movements through time, you need to establish which categories of events you want to track. These will vary depending on the sort of series you’re writing. I’ve included a timeline I built for Matrin, the world of the Secret Texts trilogy and Vincalis the Agitator. I’d mapped out about a bit under a hundred Matrin years, which ran longer than Earth years (different planet) and covered a broad range of events in group, geopolitical, and resource-related events to give myself years of conflict in what I visualized—and pitched—as a long-running series following the Galweigh and Sabir families through a Renaissance period following their world’s thousand-year-long Dark Age.

Yup. Whole world. Global Catastrophe. Generally Dark Ages are confined to nations and regions, and the rest of the world goes merrily on its way—but if you remember all those holes I talked about drawing in the Matrin map with my compass, you’ll understand that I was looking for a legitimate explanation for a cause for the fall of ALL civilizations when I drew that sucker.

And I gave myself a ton of white space.

When you’re building your own timeline, you set up categories in which you’ll track:

- Personal events: Important things individual characters do.

Examples: Villain kills hero’s best friend.

Protagonist dyes her hair blonde.

Hero’s dog swallows the Ring of Power and leads a brief but memorable canine insurrection before the ring…ah…moves on.

- Local events: Things going on in your character’s region that affect their actions, whether directly related to your story or not.

Examples: Barbarian raids along the neighboring coast cause widespread panic and the formation of local militias.

The next town over gets the factory (and jobs) the hero’s town was fighting to win.

- Resource events: Changes in the accessibility of things your character uses to survive.

Examples: Local drought causes food shortage and causes massive increase in prices that cause many families to lose their homes and emigrate to regions outside the drought area, while killing many who cannot leave.

The shortage of an herb that enhances telepathy and its substitution of a placebo by the Justiciars guild causes widespread miscarriages of justice. Previously infallible Justiciars fake their verdicts. This permits corruption to enter the system through the discovery by some men that the Justiciars are no longer capable of reading truth in the minds of the judged.

- World events: Wars, the rise and fall of empires, discoveries in different parts of your universe, the births and deaths of monarchs and legends.

Time maps are primarily question generators for plot and conflict.

How to make a Time Map.

Rulers and architects’ straight edges, especially the cork-backed kind, are very nice for making time maps. But if you’re lacking supplies or budget, you can get the same straight lines by folding a piece of paper from corner to corner.

If you don’t or can’t draw, you can get the same results by deciding what measure of time you want to use, and creating a list of somewhere between ten and a hundred evenly spaced numbers.

If you’re writing science fiction or fantasy, you can go with something like P.E. −100 to P.E. 100, (for the Phrygistian Era, named after Meliborne Phrygistos). If you’re working in our world and in the past or the future, pick a block of time you’d like to cover. Run from a decade or a century before (depending on the size of your preferred blocks) to a decade or a century after.

Unless you are developing a timeline for a single main character, I recommend leaving a lot of white space between your years, and doing your blocks with round numbers or halves.

1910, 1920, 1930, 1940…

Or 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015…

When you do this, you can block out a period for the lifespan of one character, do a detail map by the month if you’d like, and still have the rest of your timeline to fall back on. That’s what I find myself having to do with Cadence Drake.

Here’s the reasoning. I want to write Cadence Drake. I also want to write Settled Space—and Settled Space existed long before Cady came along. Because of the life extension technology available to her, I have no idea how long she’ll survive, or what the limitations of the tech are—at this point in her universe, nobody knows.

But I do not want her to be the universe. I want her to be one interesting part in it.

So when you’re setting up your own timeline, look at the character you’re writing now, but also look beyond. When you get tired of this character, or need some variety, can you stay in the same world, move to a different part of it, and find fresh stories to tell?

Your Turn

Make A Timeline Map

(This is an alternative method to the graph-paper timeline map presented in the White Space and Timelines video worksheets.)

Make a big sheet of paper.

1. Tape the backs of sheets of printer paper together until you have about three times as much room left to right as you think you’ll need. You’ll have to have a lot of white space both before and after the part of the world you’re building now.

(One of my most annoying mistakes has been starting timelines on the left, which meant I didn’t have room to explore the past.)

2. Turn the paper over so you don’t have to work across tape.

3. Draw the following lines:

Core Point Line: Draw one line (or outline the equivalent) that goes from the left to the right of your paper. This will be the history of your core point. Mark off equidistant time units in your biggest blocks. Decades, centuries, whichever you’ve decided on. It depends on the story you’re telling now, but if you make the spacing on these units twice as big as you think you’ll need, you won’t have to use separate detail maps quite so often.

In the very middle of this line, mark off the time frame for the story you’re writing now. Do this in pencil, change it to pen once you have the book both completed and revised.

Pencil is a poor choice for drawing geographic maps, but your first choice for writing in story details on timeline maps. This is where you’ll write in events that happen in your Core Point in your stories, but also offstage. If it happens in the Core Point, it goes here.

One Secondary Point Line: Draw a second line from end to end. This line does not represent a physical place. Rather, it represents events that take place in your stories in as many secondary points as you end up using in your series.

Genealogy Maps

Genealogy maps are fantastic for folks who are writing extended series across generations (something I’d planned to do with the Matrin books, but which never materialized—the midlist-unfriendly changes affecting commercial publishing being the culprit again).

The tiny image above is the Galweigh family tree, which traces the path of the Karnee curse through the Family’s bloodlines. The full-sized (and thus readable) PDF is another one of your downloads available in the classroom.

Going into this level of detail in building a world makes no sense if you’re publishing commercially. You have no control over whether you’ll be able to write the books you plan in your world or not. This sort of mapping makes perfect sense if you’re indie-publishing, however. You have generations of characters sitting on your page waiting for you to tell their stories, and as much time and space as you choose to take to devote to each one.

Genealogy maps are primarily question generators for character, and to a lesser degree, conflict—as in, “Holy crap, your family tree really doesn’t branch! What’s up with that?”

Live-In Maps

A live-in map is three-dimensional.

You build it, and then you can walk or fly through it, can develop the spatial relationships of places within your story to each other, and can then understand how long it is going to take your character to get home when starting from Main Street and walking, for example…

…Or how long it’s going to take your chararacter to get to the bridge of her spaceship from the ship’s dining hall if that’s where she was caught in an emergency.

Live-in maps are spectacular for more than simply getting a sense of spatial relationships, however.

If you’re building block by block, and creating little stories in your head as you build, you will find yourself adding in the following:

- General Question Generators

- Character Generators

- Plot Generators

- Conflict Generators

I built out three live-in maps for current and upcoming work and because these are live-in maps, I was able to walk through the same places my characters walk through, and wonder about what could happen there.

This is the first of two Core Points for my Weyrd’s Place universe. This is Weyrd’s Place—the sapient house—from one angle.

Just this one segment of the map operates as a large number of individual Sets, as a Core Point, as a Pass-Through, as White Space, as a Question Generator, as a Plot/Character Generator, and as a Conflict Generator.

While some flat maps can be this versatile if you work hard at making them so, three-dimensional maps spontaneously generate the elements your stories need as you build them—IF, as you build, you stay focused on the world in which you’re working and remember to ask yourself questions.

This is the second image I’m including from the Weyrd’s Place universe: This is the Weyrd’s place lobby. Because this is a two-dimensional image (and tiny) you don’t get the sense of how big this place is that you get when you’re standing inside it.

I’ve only seen it in two dimensions on my computer screen, which is which is far better than as single still shots.

However, my younger son has walked through my maps using the Optimus Rift (a 3-D virtual reality headset) and says it’s much more real when there is nothing in the universe but the universe.

This is the second Core Point of the Weyrd’s Place map, a fictionalized bit of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where these stories will mostly take place. It is reachable by an interesting pass-through. I’ve included the complete map as one of the free downloads, I demo the pass-through in the Pass-Through Demo video included with this course. Go to the back of this book to get the links you’ll need to get your videos and maps.

The maps are Minecraft maps, which means I built them inside the Minecraft game.

https://minecraft.net

To be useable, the maps require a separate purchase of the Minecraft game (not affiliated in any way with my site or me).

DISCLAIMER: I make no money from recommending Minecraft, I have no interest in the company, and I can’t teach you how to play the game or use creative mode.

But you don’t need to have me teach you how to use the Minecraft software. YouTube has a ton of tutorials, and there are countless Minecraft tutorials on other sites as well.

I recommend Minecraft as a writing tool and for all fiction writers who want to get better world and story ideas quickly and easily.

But I’ll also note this:

You do not have to download or use my maps to get full value from this course.

If you get them, though, you will be able to walk through all three complete worlds. They are far too large to go through entirely in videos videos, they are full of secret places and hidden objects, and by walking through what I’ve built, you you will get a far better idea of what you can build to meet your story goals.

Introductions To The Maps

Cady’s World, Settled Space: Image #1

The map above is Bailey’s Irish Space Station, from my Settled Space universe.

This is a case where building a three-dimensional map of a flat map changed the course of a novel.

I’d graphed out the spaceship Corrigan’s Blood on standard quadrille paper. When I drew it, I figured each block as ten feet.

When I bought Minecraft, I decided to build the ship as my first mapping project—and discovered that each block in Minecraft was supposed to represent a three-foot-by-three-foot cube, the player character was six feet tall, and capping a room to a height of three blocks would give you nine-foot ceilings.

So I scaled the Corrigan’s Blood down to the Minecraft scale size to make it easier to build. (I didn’t have to figure for partial blocks that way.)

Three blocks to a square would make the ship somewhat smaller than I planned, but I figured it would still be workable.

I started building, and began to get nervous…I developed a sort of “this cannot possibly be right” gut warning.

The last time I’d had that same warning, I was twenty years old, knitting a sweater for my fiancé, and it seemed a bit large. But I knit it anyway, carefully pieced it together, carefully finished it, reassuring myself that because I had carefully checked my gauge and because I was following the pattern exactly, it would turn out all right.

Not so much.

It was monstrous. Three big men could have worn that sweater simultaneously. Paul Bunyan would have found it roomy.

Now here I was again, following my scaled down diagram exactly. And carefully counting out blocks and making sure everything replicated the ship’s curves and lines.

The Corrigan’s Blood wasn’t workable.

It was freaking enormous.

Even scaled down from 1 square = 10 feet to 1 square = 9 feet, it was nothing remotely close to a ship one or two people would take across the galaxy alone. It was a monster that could hold—and would need—half a dozen crew members to operate comfortably. It could easily carry a couple dozen passengers, and its cargo holds were roomy enough to let the owner go into business smuggling shuttlecraft while trading in live elephants as a cover.

It was so big I ended up building a lake on the top deck, for Pete’s sake.

On paper, scale diagrams do not connect to the real world in a meaningful matter.

Cady’s World, Settled Space: Image #2

In this diagram, from a tremendous height, you can see (from top to bottom) the built-out versions of Cady’s first ship, the Hope’s Reward, her third ship, the West, and the ship I’d planned for her to keep as her permanent home, the Corrigan’s Blood.

As part of the purchase of this course, you get the flat scale-layout diagrams for all three ships as downloadable PDFs, as well as other diagrams I used for writing the second novel, Warpaint.

My diagrams from the writing of Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood, the original versions of the Hope’s Reward and the Corrigan’s Blood were lost in yet another move.

Longview World, Settled Space: Image #1

Finally, this is my map for the Longview series, which I’m starting into after I finish this book (along with building the How To Write A Series Expansion, which will use those six stories as step-by-step examples.

In the image above, you see the modified slow-travel settlement ship Longview, which has been coated with moleibond and refitted with TFN units and fast in-system engines (and much scarier internal refits), the moliebond grav-drop space needle linking the ground to the spaceship hookup (the space needle is way too short because of the limitations of Minecraft building heights), and a relevant building (question generator) within the region’s travel hub.

You could fit maybe ten or a dozen Corrigan’s Bloods inside the Longview, by the way—or forty or fifty of those big white houses.

Size is deceptive in two-dimensional images.

Longview World, Settled Space: Image #2

In this image, I have the Big White House, a demonstration build-out of the town, the prison, the Death Circus, and the Voluntary Sacrifice pit. All of these act as Character, Plot, and Conflict Generators. Building them, walking through them, I kept coming up with more and more story ideas, until I realized I could write in just this segment of the Settled Space universe for the rest of my career, and never run out of stories.

Longview World, Settled Space: Image #3

The last is a view from about two thirds of the way up the space needle, where you’re close enough to be able to see the transport shuttle leaving the ship. All parts of the ship, including that shuttle, are reachable and enterable, and contain places you can walk through, buttons you can push and switches you can flip that make some surprising things happen, and lots of story generator signs and notes I have in there for my own use.

A live-in map is NOT a small three-dimensional model. It is life-sized.

This utterly changes the way you see and experience the universe in which you’re writing.

And if you’re writing far-future space opera, or any sort of techie SF, or otherworld fantasy, or any other type of story in which the things you make in your head don’t exist in reality, it lets you make them real, and then use them as if you were in your own story.

This was an enormous help in writing WARPAINT. Which is why I built Bailey’s Irish Space Station for the next couple of books.

THE

GEEK-DEEP

DEMOS

GEEK-DEEP DEMO 1

List-Mapping An Ecosystem

The last thing you absolutely need to know in order to do successful Geek-Deep worldbuilding (which we’ll define as worldbuilding that won’t land you naked in hyena territory) is how to create your own systems.

The systems you’ll need depend on the sort of universe you’re building, and on how important it is to you to be able to fill the white space on any section of your map quickly while having your systems still make sense.

I’m going to introduce, and then expand upon, three system lists I put together for my own use.

While—because these ARE for my own use—they are demonstrations of how how to worldbuild one essential staple of science fiction: the alien ecosystem; and one essential system of fantasy: the magical system; and how to world-build a unique feature of one of my universes: an alternative system of categorizing human gender, these demos show you:

- How to think your way through ANY large and complex environmental system to create just the story physics you need,

- How to think your way through ANY fictional worldbuilding where you need to have specific rules of limitation,

- And how to think your way through ANY fictional worldbuilding where you need to create an alternate cultural structure, and  narrow down the vast possibilities to just the essentials you’ll use.

I’m going to present my list maps and add in the “how you use this” notes that will give you pointers on making your systems lean and smart and workable.

The first two demos are simple. The third is complex.

List Map One: Worldbuilding Ecosystems

Life feeds on waste.

You breathe the waste product of plant photosynthesis—trees suck in the trash you exhale as part of cellular respiration. You eat plant life and, in a natural system, your excretia becomes the mulch that feeds the plants you eat. Trash is a product Life knows how to use.

How you use this:

This one is both easy and fun. As you’re building your trees and animals, your rocks and oceans, ask yourself “What happens when this thing I’ve designed breaks, erodes, explodes, burns down, rots, melts, or dies?”

Everything comes apart sooner or later. And everything that comes apart becomes a potential food source/fuel/resource for something else. Rotted prehistoric vegetation from ancient lakes and seas plus high pressure becomes coal (stored energy) and sometimes diamonds (stored “Oh, cool!”). One feeds furnaces to keep you warm, and one feeds millionaire’s girlfriends, to keep millionaires warm.

Life grabs opportunities.

Excess of any kind will make an opening for any new form of life that can figure out how to use it. Expect, within the next few thousand years or so, the arrival of the Huggies Monster and the Tire Mound Scavenger.

How you use this:

You ask yourself, “What sort of living thing could make use of this excess, whether it is simply something that over-bred its food source, or whether it is a broken, dead, or deconstructed thing?”

My decidedly smartass Huggies Monster comment was only partially in jest. Leave enough of disposable diapers around, and something will find a way to eat them. From the worldbuilder perspective, however, you’re looking to build a solution to excess, not wait for it to evolve. When you’re designing stuff that eats waste products, you’re designing scavengers, which, to be effective, must first be able to survive whatever toxins killed the dead host, or grew in it after its death. To get a Huggies Monster, you need something that likes either ammonia and…mmm…post-processed food, or plastic compounds, or that fluffy white filler in disposable diapers. It doesn’t need to be fast or toothy, because diapers can’t run or fight. But it does need to be hardy, disease-resistant, and able to get itself clean easily (probably not much in the way of fur or feathers going on anyplace that actually touches diapers…)

To get a creature that survives on living excess, you’re designing a predator, and in the words of the chubby guy in sneakers outrunning the chubby guy in flip-flops, “I don’t need to be faster than Godzilla, buddy. I just need to be faster than you.”

Your marginally faster prey will survive. Your predator needs to be faster than the slow and weak. As it and its offspring breed, feeding and thriving on the slow and weak, predation will make its prey stronger over time (because the strongest and fastest survive to breed). This, however, will mean that only the smartest or fastest of your predators will also survive. This is weapons escalation. Of which, more later.

Life likes volatiles.

Stable elements like nitrogen are never going to be the fuel of a life form. Think of them as bran—they go in and they come out unchanged. You need unstable stuff, which Life can mix and match like Tinkertoys®. Any nice moderately unstable stuff will do, however.

How you use this:

Plants and aerobes make use of oxygen and carbon dioxide, with the waste product of one being the core fuel of respiration for the other. If you are building non-oxygen-based life, you’ll want to explore alternative gas forms that separate and recombine easily between two forms, and that remain gaseous within whatever atmospheric and gravitational parameters you’ve set for your home world.

I’ve stuck with the oxygen/carbon dioxide cycle for my own use, simply because I couldn’t figure out any conflicts I could create by making the intelligent life of another world or planetary completely incompatible with Earth-like atmospheres and inhabitants that I couldn’t do better by also forcing my life forms to share resources.

The way I prefer to get good conflict is by bringing creatures who have most things in common together and letting them struggle for the dominance of their preferred incompatibilities. For me, total chemical incompatibility suggested that neither oxygen-breathers nor methane-breathers had much to lose or gain from each other: their lack of shared chemistry allowed me to see them waving as they passed each other in space, but not much more.

My take on this, however, need not be yours.

Redundancy matters.

The smaller and weaker and tastier you are, the more kids you must have all at once to guarantee survival of the species. If you are a member of a species that gives birth to snacks at the point where they are most likely to be devoured, you’ll have millions of children at a time. Witness a mayfly hatch if you doubt this.

How you use this:

Living things must have fuel. Where plants are plentiful, plant-eaters will congregate to eat them. Where plant-eaters are plentiful, predators will congregate to eat them. And where predators are plentiful, scavengers will congregate to eat what predators leave behind.

Big predators are fun to write and fun to look at…but to avoid story stupids, you need to avoid creating Big Predators With No Food Sources.

Develop workable food chains using my “You Might Need” list, with the following warning before you get to the list:

Build light and lean, so you don’t contradict yourself as you write deeper into your world. Build just what you’re going to use right now.

In my case, I knew I was going to have dragons in Arhel. As far as I’m concerned, dragons have four legs and two wings, and are hot-blooded, like birds, rather than cold-blooded, like lizards.

There are no flying lizards in terrestrial ecosystems. There are gliding lizards, which use their rib cages as wing analogues—but their “wings,” which are actually sails, have no muscle networks or pivots to adapt over time. Also, lizards are cold-blooded, and their slow metabolisms aren’t workable for sustaining the high energy outputs necessary for powered flight. So you cannot make a case for the evolution of four-legged, winged dragons from lizards.

There are both flying dinosaurs and their direct descendants, flying birds, which have true powered flight, use their forelimbs as wings, with the structure of wings is analogous to hands and arms in other species, and have two legs. The problem here is, though dinosaurs and birds have fantastic mechanisms for powered flight, they don’t have a third set of limbs to give you a four-legged, winged dragon.

To have consistent comparative anatomy and be able to trace a clean evolutionary path, a dragon with four legs and two wings has to have six-limbed ancestors. Which means an alternate evolutionary path.

(These comments are all spoilers for the ARHEL novels, and I apologize, but this is how you make immersive worlds, so I can’t very well be coy.)

Because I wanted four-legged, warm-blooded, winged dragons in the first universe I was planning to spend my career in, I had to create an alternate evolutionary pathway that contained precursor evolutionary forms.

And to make the path valid, I needed them in a food chain.

In my Arhel example, hovies were flying, six-limbed, omnivorous prey that lived on plants and insects; kellinks were six-limbed carnivorous predators; and dragons were six-limbed, omnivorous sapients. All three shared analogous endoskeletons, pebble-scaled skins, and warm-blooded, bird-like metabolisms.

I had the same limited, local, representative food chain with cows, wolves, and humans—all mammals, all four-limbed. I had some relevant story-related flora, too.

But the point here is this: That which is ordinary need not be mentioned.

That which is extraordinary, however, needs to be not just mentioned, but also planned.

In my case, hovies and kellinks were extraordinary by virtue of being from a six-limbed evolutionary chain—but I worked them into my story with strong story parts to adhere to the “show the gun” rule while not letting readers in on the fact that my hovies and kellinks were the gun.

Dragons, when I finally brought them into the story, were “shoot the gun,” which I’d shown in plain daylight and in a couple of variations. I used the sleight of hand of making both hovies and kellinks important in their own parts of the story (extraordinary) to keep people from focusing on my real reason for having them there: to establish the presence of a second fully-realized evolutionary chain.

So the things you want to show need to be both things worth using in their own right (hovies, for example, are cute and appealing to small children, while kellinks are big, scary, fast, mean, and horribly poisonous), and things that lead to your eventual “shoot the gun” moment. Hovies and kellinks were both also critters that allowed me to set up bigger surprises without cheating. Dragons did not arrive in a biological vacuum.

The “You Might Need” List:

This is an area where your worldbuilding can get out of hand with blinding speed, so use a Criticals Dots worksheet for this phase of development, and do representative species in just your dot location.

Representative: One variety of creature implies a thousand variants of different sorts. Applied, this means if you build a sheepdog, you do not also have to build a thousand other breeds of dogs, wolves, dire wolves, coyotes, dingos, etc. Your sheepdog can fill the entire developmental category for predatory, carnivorous pack mammals that share a canine social structure and appearance.

Just your dot location: The part of the story you know you’re writing toward (in my case, dragons that belong in the world) plus the two stepping stones that will get you to it.

So you’ll build three variant dots on a single theme. In my case, my theme is six-limbed evolutionary chain. My three representative dots are hovie, kellink, dragon). I create one criticals dot for each of them. The elements on the dot for hovie would be:

- Four wings, two legs, in A A B order

- Eats insects and seeds

- Small, plentiful, and tasty

Hovie becomes the representative for all creatures in that evolutionary change with wings as both the first and second pairs of limbs, and with legs as the third pair of limbs. The limb arrangement is primary—there will be creatures with the same limb arrangement that eat only seeds, ones that eat only small prey, ones that hunt small and larger prey, and ones that are neither plentiful nor tasty, as well as those that are. Some may be large and flightless. They will adapt to fill areas where food has become plentiful. When I create the hovie and drop it into a scene, I have then made it possible to drop in other creatures with the same anatomical configuration in other regions, and have them work.

The elements on the dot for kellink would be:

- Six legs, no wings

- Pack predator, fast and smart

- Poisonous saliva, hunts live prey and scavenges dead things

Again, the primary element in this arrangement is going to be the flightless, six-legged nature of my beast. Some may be pack animals, some may be solitary hunters, some may be herbivorous prey, and some might be dumb as rocks but heavily armored and big. But by showing one flightless six-legged pack of poisonous pack hunters, I establish the form as an evolutionary variable, and can then add in other variants in different environments to fill out my world. I don’t need to build anything else there—what I’ve already built gives me a couple million other options I can introduce at any time.

Finally, the elements dot for dragon would be:

- Limb arrangement is foreleg-hand, wing, hindleg

- Sapient, with both written and verbal languages

- Fully developed civilization

Here, where again my limb arrangement is my primary element, I have something that offers me the option of manipulatory appendages (dragons have three long-taloned fingers and an equally long-taloned thumb on each foreleg).

This does not mean that every creature with this limb arrangement needs to have hands. Or self-cognition. It means, though, that I can have my dragons, and the mini-dragon equivalent of monkeys, and the sleek Pegasus equivalent of dragonish, galloping, herd-beasts with wings (which seem really cool to me). And so on. I don’t have to create them when I’m doing the dot for the dragon. I simply have to establish that I have created a third anatomical variant with my forearm-wing-hindleg form, and remember as I’m writing that this variant will exist in other species.

If you’re using the Line World: Divide for Conflict worksheet to do your own theme variants and food chains, (which I recommend), in your left column, you’re going to have variants on your single theme.

In your right column, you’ll tack together food chains.

Kellinks don’t eat hovies. Can’t catch them. Dragons don’t eat kellinks. (Not much of anything wants to eat poisonous scavengers, except for worms and bugs and maggoty things.)

You do food chains to keep yourself from creating stupid worlds.

Dot 1 on the right is going to answer the question “What do hovies eat?”

And the answer can be:

- Insects

- Tiny amphibians

- Berries and seeds

From this, you drop into your story the bugs that bite your characters as they’re crossing a plain, the sounds of little amphibians chirping and singing from their puddles and swamps, and the cloud of hovies that launch into the air when your characters discover a patch of delicious red berries (that give everyone the trots next day).

Next, you ask, “What do kellinks eat?” and you answer:

- Anything they can catch and bite (though they prefer their food dead and rotted, so they track their food until it dies from their poison, then drag it back to their closest larder

- Anything that’s already dead

- Anything that stinks of decaying flesh (living but gangrenous creatures, for example)

In your story, you’ll have your characters trip across a corpse-yard with both bones and rotting bodies and some relatively fresh kills, and will have them stir up the lazy pack of kellinks that are dozing in the shade and tall grass, waiting for their food—spoiling in the sun—to get disgusting enough.

And you have your folks try to set out poisoned baits of rotting meat, only to discover that poisonous things are hard to kill with poison.

And so on.

Remember that food chains can cross environments. Plenty of land animals live on fish and other water-based life, and some water-biome creatures prey on land-based life.

Remind yourself, “Only what I need right now.”

Stop the instant you have what you need for the part of the story you’re working in, come back later when you need to follow up.

Here are examples of some possible, useful groupings you might need to build as you’re writing your story.

Remember, don’t build them until you actually need them. And don’t feel any obligation to stick to my idea starters. Ask yourself questions about the details your world needs.

“You Might Need” Groups

Up to three important small plants:

- A water plant (maybe one that contributes to the atmosphere)

- A plant for grazing beasts (something grassy or shrubby)

- A fruit-bearing plant (something that could be domesticated)

Up to three important big plants:

- A useful tree-thing (you could build with it or live in it or live beneath it)

- An obstacle tree-thing (has nasty pollen, grows in wall-like formations, or scatters poisonous fruit that off-gasses as it rots)

- A scary tree-thing (harbors dangerous animals,  has strangling branches, or is carnivorous, and can dig its roots out of the dirt and come after you)

Up to three prey animals

- Tasty swimming or flying thing

- Tasty walking or burrowing thing

- Tasty climbing or digging thing

Up to three predator animals

- Swimming or flying hunter (primary prey?)

- Walking or burrowing hunter (primary prey?)

- Climbing or digging hunter (primary prey?)

Up to three scavenger animals

- Swimming or flying scavenger (what hunter or trail does it follow?)

- Walking or burrowing scavenger (what hunter or trail does it follow?)

- Climbing or digging scavenger (what hunter or trail does it follow?)

Up to three sapient species

- Swimming or flying sapient (what physiological weaknesses necessitated advanced intelligence to overcome them?)

- Walking or burrowing sapient (what physiological weaknesses necessitated advanced intelligence to overcome them?)

- Climbing or digging sapient (what physiological weaknesses necessitated advanced intelligence to overcome them?)

For the things you do build, figure out where plants will grow and how how those plants will reproduce: for example, by setting pollen into the wind; dispersing water-borne spores; or by using helper animals that can be lured into the plants’ reaches by an exchange of food for packages of pollen dust stuck to legs or bellies or mouths.

Figure out how viable seeds can be spread: for example, by dropping directly to the ground; by burrs that catch on animals’ fur and are carried some distance from the parent plant; or by seeds in fruit that will drop out in excrement when an animal digests the fruit.

Then figure out which animals can eat the plants, which parts of the plants they eat…

…And one or two predators which eat the plant-eaters…

And finally someone clever who can domesticate the plants and animals, including both the herbivores and the predators, and breed them into helper species: sheep, horses, dogs, cats. Or equivalents.

There are at least five ways of doing anything and Life will try them all.

Take traveling as an example. Fly, swim, hop, run, bounce, slither, burrow, tumble, float on a breeze, or roller-skate. Or travel as a parasite in someone else’s belly. You’ll still get from point A to point B.

How you use this:

While you’re having fun building life forms, keep in mind that there are lots of cool alternatives to putting one foot in front of another to get places.

There was this big, rugged inflatable ball with a handle on it called a Hippity Hop when I was a kid. You sat on it, hung on to the handle, and launched yourself into the air with your legs, landing on the ball—with the impact shock starting at your rear end and running all the way up your spine—at the end of each bounce.

I keep visualizing these animals with two legs and a giant, tough belly-bladder they fill with air that they can push off with and land on—and I find myself imagining the terrain that would permit this evolutionary development by virtue of being smooth and gently rolling and lacking in things that are sharp and pointy.

In my mind, the broad group for the many variant species of this creature is the bellybongs. They sound to me like creatures that would live in an outback somewhere.

Remember the bellybongs. They’ll return.

Microclimates demand microecologies.

Every desert, island, jungle, mountain, desert, valley, and ice field gives you the opportunity to invent neat new life forms adapted to their environment. Furthermore, each of these specialized terrains demands that you take it into account when designing life forms. A desert rabbit, a jungle rabbit, a tundra rabbit, and a plains rabbit will all have very different characteristics, and will not be able to inhabit each other’s ecological niches.

How you use this:

This is why “desert planets” and “jungle planets” and “ice planets” and in most cases, “city planets” suck.

Not only are they ridiculous from a geologic perspective, but they’re boring. They are the preferred stomping grounds of the lazy, sloppy worldbuilder, and the frequent trap of new worldbuilders hoping for better.

If you’re a writer stuck with a “grassland planet,” you can’t have your bellybongs, which have adapted to rolling grasslands, run out of their biome and into a place for which they have not adapted at all.

You can’t have earthquakes raise mountains, toss tidal waves, spew volcanic ash, and dump new challenges into the grasslands.

You can’t force the hungry forest wolverns, starving after a die-off of the deerabbits that are their primary prey, out into the edges of the grasslands to search for new things to eat. Like your bellybongs.

Neither can you have your two city kids whose parents were killed in an air raid dumped into a pony farm in the country, where they will have to adapt quickly to their new environment.

And that will be a shame, because one of the best story devices possible is the “fish out of water” story, in which your fish must adapt, or get back to water, or die.

Big predators eat a LOT.

If you have a wide variety of big predators, the number of little buggers you will need to support them is mind-boggling. Don’t forget to design a wide and weird variety of little guys, too. And don’t forget to mention them, show them, and have them play some part in your story. The absence of small, non-predatory life forms on planets that support a wide variety of huge, hungry monsters demonstrates sloppy writing and that the writer has no concept of how a planet and its lifeforms work.

How you use this:

We’ve dealt with a variant of this in detail above.

However, this is about creature size, and needs separate mention.

It takes much more food to support big life forms than it does small ones. Further, the more food your creature has to eat to obtain its adult size, the more plentiful and the easier that food must be to obtain.

Cats who don’t have someone feeding them are lean. Even the big ones, because catching and killing food is hard work.

Polar bears are also comparatively lean. They have to have some body fat to maintain their body heat in the ice waters and grounds where they hunt. But they have much less fat per pound than their preferred prey, which consists mostly of seals, with fish, berries, mice and other rodents, and so on as fillers.

It’s much harder to get big on food you have to run down and kill than it is to get big on food that can’t escape. This is why the largest creatures on the planet are herbivores, not carnivores. The blue whale eats algae. The elephant eats grasses and plants and other vegetarian fare.

Big predators who eat small prey have to have that prey available in schools, herds, pods, or flocks, and they’ll have the best chance of survival if that food has to come to them, so they don’t have to expend massive amounts of energy to get it.

The shorelines of watering holes are the favorite hunting grounds of lions, crocodiles, alligators, and other hunters. Most life forms need to drink. Without the solvent water, water-based creatures’ bodies have no way of carrying out the chemical processes that keep them alive.

So sooner or later, animals will brave the presence of predators to take their chance at reaching water, and thus continuing to live.

Memorize this. Big predators need lots of food.

This process happens in the wild—and it happens in civilization. Consider what your characters must have to survive, and put their predators in position to get them when they have to go after it.

Life’s Big Three: Eat, Excrete, Reproduce.

If you can design your beasties with these three factors in mind, all art, psychology, warfare, science, and religion will follow. Try it, using only one of the big three. Create a sapient creature. Figure out what it eats, and how it must go about gathering or acquiring its food. Because it is sapient, tool development for food acquisition will ensue, as it figures out more efficient ways to gather its current food.

It will, furthermore, teach its offspring to use tools, and its offspring will have improved survival rates compared to others in its species — a successful foray into reproductive improvement. More complex tools will follow as your sapient becomes more efficient.

And this efficiency will have a price on your creature’s environment (the extinction of over-hunted herds or the destruction of top-soil in over-planted or over-grazed fields, for example) that will necessitate further tool development, and changes in social structure. Cities or wars may ensue.

How you use this:

This is the long view of civilization, and you don’t develop it in a day. If you’re writing through time, you can show this happening. If you’re writing in a single time, you’ll need to think through the history of the cool tech you introduce, and do little dots for each piece of tech as you build it.

Tech, by the way, includes things like candles made of beeswax, pencils, whalebone corsets, high heels, chalkboards and chalk, a water closet instead of a hole in the dirt, and so on. It isn’t just spaceships and gravdrops and nano-tech.

Every story that isn’t about people living in fireless caves eating raw roaches that they hunt and kill with their bare hands includes tech. You need to know the history of yours—but again, only when you use it.

The questions you ask about tech are:

- Who made it, and when?

- What primary purpose did it serve then, and has that purpose changed over time?

- How can you improve it in the future, and how does that tie into your story, or future stories?

Life is weapons escalation.

New weapons (tools for guaranteeing the safety of the breeding population of any species) breed new defenses, which make new weapons necessary, which—aw, hell, just ask the Pentagon. This holds as true for a plant’s excreted toxic resins or a deer’s better antler design or a skunk’s more noxious skunk gland spray as it does for a human’s Star Destroyer or Colt Peacemaker. Something, somewhere, will develop a way of getting around the defense to get at what it wants.

(And part B of this rule — Unlike the Pentagon, Life balances the budget.)

Any species that expends its energy in weapons development while shortchanging eating, excreting, and reproducing is going to become extinct. Any weapon system that makes too big a drain on the creature’s resources will cause its eventual extinction. (Pity this rule doesn’t work in the strange microecology of government.) (Or does it?)

Demo 1: The Mating Weapon—There was a species of deerlike mammal that developed massive, curling, complex antlers. Enough pairs of these antlers have been found entangled for the folks who theorize about the rise and fall of breeding species to come up with the following hypothesis:

The antlers required massive resources drawn from the male’s food intake to build, making those same resources unavailable for staying healthy; the males in rutting season were more prone to die from their battle because:

1. they spent such massive resources each year to grow the new set of antlers, which cost them in overall condition and increased chances of death when they were wounded, and

2. the tendency of these enormously complex antlers becoming entangled, causing both males to starve to death.

The more muscular and healthier the males of this species (thus the bigger and more complex the antlers), the more likely they would be to fatally entangle their antlers with those of their rivals, thus wiping out the premium breeders in pairs as they starved to death or became the prey of predators who discovered an easy kill.

This left those males with less elaborate racks and better overall general health more opportunity to mate.

Demo 2: The Best of Show Weapon—Pedigreed dogs and cats, because of the inbreeding that went into developing the various breeds, have become subject to “founder effect” genetic disorders that result in hip dysplasia, respiratory problems, small litters, difficult birthings, and so on.

Demo 3: The “God Says We’re In Charge” Weapon—Royalty generally starts with an extraordinary founder. A natural leader saves the lives and property of not only his immediate family but others in his surrounding area.

Once proven successful, people who appreciate his competence accept his rule (and pay him in various ways) in order to get the benefits of his superior leadership…and sometimes he raises and trains competent offspring to replace himself and continue the ongoing protection in exchange for compensation when he dies.

However, power breeds corruption, and corruption breeds the passion for hanging on to power no matter how competent one might be.

At some point, the “God gave me to you as a protector” position that gave the founder earned power becomes a “God decreed this family is special” claim, which is frequently shored up by assertions of semi-divine origin. And this semi-divinity will be trotted out to prove that the ancestors of the Great Original retain claim to the right to tell everyone else what to do while still receiving compensation from those under their power.

The claim “God decreed this family is special” has built-in teeth, though, because at what point does a family breed itself out of its magical, pure bloodline?

The historical question becomes “How do we hang on to being special for hundreds or thousands of years?

The historical answer is usually to make sure family members marry and breed with each other. In this way, only insiders can hang on to accumulated wealth and power for centuries.

By marrying brothers to sisters, first cousins to each other, second cousins to each other, aunts with uncles, and so on, no one can argue that the “pure blood” has been diluted by common blood.

However, the results of keeping the bloodline pure show up over time as the qualified and competent dynastic originator is replaced with inbred heirs plagued by madness, hemophilia, mental deficiencies, crippling physical abnormalities, infertility, and more.

How you use this:

Weapons are the infinite category of “those survival tools and strategies that permit individual members of a species to survival long enough to reproduce.”

All weapons can be improved. All weapons can be degraded. All weapons can be turned against their users.

Your job is to:

- Determine what tools and strategies your various life forms use to get themselves to the next generation,

- Figure out how to improve those strategies,

- Figure out how to interfere with those strategies

- And figure out how to turn those strategies against the ones who use them, whether they are your heroes or your villains or your folks’ dinners…

…Because in the search for good fictional conflict, one of the best places to find the amazing is in the moment where a character discovers that the weapon that always worked has been trumped by someone or something that has arrived on the scene with a bigger, better tool or strategy.

Specialists are more efficient.

Specialists meet the Big Three by doing a certain thing a certain way—by only sipping nectar from the flowers of the rare thurka tree, for example. Specialists let the thurka tree provide for all their needs, and thus conserve the energy trial and error require.

How you use this:

There is no need for intelligence in the atmosphere of “everything is provided.”

If a species is born on the thurka tree, lives out its life on the thurka tree, breeds on the thurka tree, and dies on the thurka tree, it needs have nothing more going for it than the instinct to stay with what works. As long as thurka trees exist, the creature that lives on them will need to avoid predators, but not much else.

So when you design specialist species that operate within the confines of a carefully regulated environment, don’t posit them as your sapients.

Generalists live longer.

Generalists have to work harder. They are rarely as good as the specialists at any one thing, but they are not too bad at meeting the Big Three. However, Generalists are not shit-out-of-luck if some virus kills off all the thurka trees. Inefficiency can save your life—something people frequently fail to consider. And only Generalists go into space.

How you use this:

Why are humans intelligent? Why are we toolmakers?

Because every single one of us has just one tool in our arsenal.

We as a species AND as individuals have comparatively lousy eyesight, just about no sense of smell, a limited sense of taste, blunt teeth, useless claws, tender skin, exposed bellies, comparatively weak muscles, and even the fastest of us are slow compared to countless species of animals.

Worse, we’re slow to reproduce and in most cases only produce one offspring at a time, each of our offspring requires massive expenses of physical resources from the mother, our breeding females are helpless for months in the end stages of pregnancy, our offspring are helpless for years after they’re born.

And we have no instincts. You drop a baby in the wild, the baby will die. Same thing with a small child. Same thing with an older child raised in solitude.

We have to learn what we know.

If you’re still thinking, “But why are we intelligent? Why are we soft, slow, fluffy creatures who can make tools and alter our environments to fit our needs?” the answer is also the question.

Because we are intelligent toolmakers, we can be comparatively soft, slow, fluffy creatures.

Humanity at the dawn of the tool-making age was a lot tougher than we are. Some pockets of humanity still are.

That does not mean they have the advantage.

It means they have an advantage in the single environment to which they’ve adapted that we can trump by introducing central heating (or central A/C) and a high-powered rifle.

If you are a tool-making, tool-using generalist whose single adaptive question is “How can I get this to work better?”, you can live in any environment. Under water. On mountaintops. In jungles. In deserts. On praires and in hill country, in towns and cities, and on other planets and in space.

The better you get at adapting your environment to meet your needs, the less you have to depend on “survival of the fittest” to determine the parameters of your world.

And as you get better at building tools, the rules of who gets to breed change from “the fittest” to “the fittest, plus the smartest, plus the cutest, plus the funniest, plus [insert your favorite human quality here].”

GEEK-DEEP DEMO 2

List-Mapping Rules of Limitation

This is a build-out of basic rules of limitation I keep in the back of my head when writing fantasy. These rules are, however, also a good example of a fully-worked through list map of Rules of Limitation.

List Map Two: Worldbuilding Magic as Story Physics

Fantasy writers take a significant amount of crap from SF writers for what the SF writers perceive as their “fluffy bunny” worldbuilding and their use of magic as an easy out for solving their characters’ problems. In fact, however, magic is no more of an easy way out for well-written fantasy than physics is an easy way out for well-written SF. The following are ten rules that will make your use of magic in your fantasy novel rigorous, and will save you from the “fluffy-bunny” label—and will, at the same time, make your story better, more entertaining, and more exciting.

1. Nothing comes from nothing.

Also known as There Ain’t No Free Lunch. Your magic must come from something, and must be caused by something. You must have a reason why your world has magic. You don’t have to state your reason, but you have to know it.

How you use this:

Figure out the source of your magic, what your characters must do to access it, how they benefit from using it, how they suffer from using it, and what it costs them to use it. Do not skip any of these steps.

2a. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

When your characters start using magic, they must be made to pay for it in some way. If it is effortless, it isn’t real, and no one will believe your story. If your hero uses magic to effect a change somewhere, the repercussions of that magical energy will have an equal and opposite effect elsewhere. The same holds true for magic used by your villain.

How you use this:

Figure out in advance what sort of opposite rebound effect a spell will have, and when your character uses his magic, you keep track of both the spell and its repercussions, and the possibly hidden rebound, and its repercussions.

Use Conflict Generator questions to get good, twisty ideas.

2b. Actions have consequences.

This rule is the storyteller’s best friend—in fantasy, in SF, in mainstream…anywhere. Follow the effects of your characters’ actions (from rule 2a) to their logical conclusion. When you make your characters pay the price for their actions, when you make them both culpable and responsible, you have made them real. Give much thought to how the effects, rebounds, and repercussions of what they do affect them and others, and write this.

How you use this:

Figure out three or four ways things can go wrong for any sort of magic you’re using.

Examples:

- If your hero is using sun magic, pulling power from the sun to one area may cause freezing in another area. Or floods. Or a bad rash of gremlin attack in the neighborhood, because gremlins hate bright, sunny days.

- If your villain is using blood magic, the evil spell you’re casting may wake sleeping monsters with pure souls and alignments toward good that start stalking him. Or the spell energy might miss its intended target and bounce back on him, turning him into a twisted, hideous, half-melted parody of a man.

- And so on…

3. Every spell has a weakness.

The most obdurate magical stone wall created by the mightiest evil wizard had better have a crack in it that a determined, intelligent hero can find with effort.

How you use this:

Intelligence, applied thought, and earned knowledge allow the creation of magical tools, artifacts, and other magical goodies. At some point, someone had to figure out how to do what he did to get what he got.

If intelligence can make a magical goody, intelligence can find a way to break it.

4. It ain’t that easy.

The glorious hero had better not be able to find the weakness in the wall by picking up a convenient book and, without having any prior magical training, reading the spell that will bring it tumbling down.

If he does find a convenient book, reading it should backfire on him, leaving him in a worse situation than he was in before.

How you use this:

Never give your hero a cheap win. Figure out how to make things go wrong, and how to make your protagonist earn his eventual victory.

5. You only get one ‘gimme’ so don’t waste it.

In a world with magic, magic is your ‘gimme’—the one thing about which your reader will unquestioningly suspend disbelief…so if you really want to tell a story that uses faster-than-light spaceships, you need to drop the magic.

How you use this:

Use Character, Plot, and Conflict Generators to develop a really good magic system. Make sure you can use your magic in at least three critical points in the story…because magic promises your reader that things he has never imagined before are going to happen in your story. If they don’t, you’ve let him down.

6. In a world with magic, magic will touch everything.

Do not lock your magicians in ivory towers and leave them alone up there with their dusty tomes and arcane paraphernalia. In a world where magic works, and works well, you’ll see folks employing it in controlling traffic, running their septic tanks, baking bread, hunting and fishing, and anything else you can imagine.

How you use this:

List needs your folks have that could be met by the use of magic. Figure out the “fuel costs” for meeting them.

7. Sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.

If your magicians have been working successfully for more than a few years, they will have surely developed corollaries to the steam engine, the telephone, the television, the radio, the electric iron and the toaster, the automobile, computers, the electric guitar, and the flush commode. They should not still be farking around with turning straw into gold. They probably won’t wear goofy pointed hats, either, though of course they can if you insist.

How you use this:

Create a timeline, and on it write in the historical landmarks of magical research and discovery, when different systems appeared (and were lost), who made various discoveries (and if their discoveries killed them or turned them into newts, when that happened). Then make sure you set your story in a specific time in your timeline, and use (or mention) both the discoveries and the discoverers at various points in your story.

8. Magic is NOT your story. People are your story.

There really isn’t much else to say about this. Just remember that, no matter how cool your technology, it will be boring to read about unless it is background for a character your readers can care about who has a problem that engages their interest.

9. If your hero creates a ‘golly-gee save-the-day gimcrack’ to solve his final problem at the end of your story, IT HAD BETTER NOT WORK!

Never, ever, give your hero an easy way out. He needs to solve his problem with his courage and integrity and compassion and native intelligence, not with a magical fix-it that arrives out of nowhere for no reason other than that you got him into a jam you can’t figure out how to get him out of.

How you use this:

At this point, you may want to scoot over to the first book in the WORLDBUILDING SERIES, Create A Character Clinic, to make sure you’ve developed a character with enough depth to deal with the final conflict.

10. Every rule has its exception, but before you decide to be the exception, you need to spend some time using the rule.

Break ‘em all if you want – but don’t break ‘em all in the same story, know which rule you’re breaking when, and only break a rule because you have a damned good reason to.

11. All other rules for writing every other type of fiction also apply.

ALL of them. And this is the exception to rule ten. There’s no exception.

GEEK-DEEP DEMO 2

List-Mapping An Alternate Cultural View of Human Gender

Is is a list map I built to figure out how my core characters in the Cadence Drake novels in my Settled Space universe view gender.

List Map Three: Worldbuilding Ten Normal Human Genders, Plus Seven Variables

Back in 1991-1992, when I was building Arhel and writing Fire in the Mist, I worked out in detail the thirteen Hoos sexual preferences, and mentioned them as half a line in the Glossary at the back of the book.

Over the years, I received a lot of mail/email asking me about those thirteen sexual orientations.

Problem is, during a move, I lost all my Arhel worldbuilding, including my ton of notes on the Hoos and their ways of looking at sex.

I still think, however, that “What WERE the 13 Hoos sexual orientations?” remains an interesting question—I think anything related to how and why people have sex is an interesting question—and I decided as the final in-book demo, I’d build a set of worldbuilding rules and then working through them, replicate what I’d done before…or at least come up with a solid replacement.

It worked out well. I roughed out the basics of what I’d built before.

However—because I’m better at this now—when I was done, I’d ended up with more than orientations. I’d come out with the expected three sexual phenotypes (a phenotype is the physical expression of any genetic combination for a specific trait): male, female, and hermaphrodite.

I am, by the way, aware that the term intersex has become preferred to hermaphrodisim in general usage when referring to humans. However, intersex refers to human individuals with any form of ambiguous genitalia or genital mosaicism.

Because I need a biological term that refers specifically to an individual with two sets of working sexual organs, one male and one female, and because a biological term exists that means exactly this, I am dropping back to the specific term hermaphrodite, used to refer to species without differentiated sexes— individuals capable of viable reproduction with any human sexual phenotype—as a third, though rare, biological norm, and one with extreme biological survival value to any generalist species.

Beyond my three phenotypes, I also ended up with ten normal and biologically necessary human genders to go with them.

And I also ended up with seven variations to describe sexual engagement and self-identification.

In my Hoos backgrounding, I’d mixed sexual engagement and self-identification in with orientations. Back then, I was still ambivalent about whether gender identification and phenotype attraction were hard-wired or learned, so I used the vague, squishy term “orientations.”

I now think gender identification and phenotype attraction are genetically hard-wired, and that gender learning is what takes place when people with socially difficult wiring learn how to keep the difficult parts contained to avoid risk of ostracism or death. So I’ve gone with the stronger term “genders” to make my meaning clear.

The first part of this exercise sets up WHY.

The second sets up HOW.

Here are the rules I set out:

1) Sex is life.

This is as simple, true, and inarguable as any worldbuilding rule can be. Without sex, complex species which rely on DNA recombination to create the necessary mutations for long-term survival die out in one generation.

2) The end goal of both the species and the individual is to survive.

All species, no matter how simple or how complex, reproduce themselves.

Specialist species—those species adapted to specific limited environment—can survive unchanged as long as they have access to unchanged environments (the alligator and shark are nice examples of species that have not needed to change.) Swamps and oceans are pretty much what they ever were.

Tough sons-a-bitches—species that can tough out any environmental disaster because they can live on next to nothing, breed thousands or tens of thousands of offspring at a time, and can withstand any environment without modification. The cockroach is a fine example of a tough son-of-a-bitch species. These species remain unchanged for eons because there are zillions of them, and no matter what hits, a few of them will survive in a crack in the rocks somewhere and come out and make more when the dust settles.

Generalist species—those species that are NOT tough, but that have to survive in the same variable and uncertain environments as tough sons-a-bitches. These species need steady mutations to provide offspring that can adapt to changing conditions.

3) Humans are a generalist species.

We are not tough. We have tender skins; poor hearing, eyesight, and sense of smell; we have only one built-in weapon (our terrific brains), we are neither swift of foot nor sharp of tooth. Nevertheless, because we have terrific brains, we have adapted to, or CAN adapt to, any environment this planet throws at us—and have proven we can adapt to environments off-planet. Better yet, we can improve our environments to meet our preferences and comfort.

Generalist species have to try all possible options in making new people all the time in order to have some version of ourselves ready to go when the shit goes down…no matter what kind of shit it might be.

The alternative is extinction. The objective of a species is to prevent its own extinction. The objective of the individual is to survive, and if possible, to keep the genes that keep him or her alive in circulation.

Generalist species—those species that have to survive in variable and uncertain environments—need steady mutations to provide offspring that can adapt to changing conditions.

Hybrid vigor occurs when members of the same species with differing genetic mutations interbreed, allowing the best mutations from different groups to spread into a wider circle. Generalist species need better mutations, so crossbreeding between recognizable race and other groups is beneficial to the species as a whole.

4) To be considered a normal human gender, the variation must do no harm to the species or the individual.

This qualification rules out rape, pedophilia, incest, and bestiality as normal variations, moving them into the realm of biological aberrations and/or experience-induced deviance.

Rape (any nonconsensual sex) and pedophilia (any sex with pre-pubescent individuals)  both do physical and psychological damage to the individual and can cause physical trauma that removes the victim from the genetic pool (even if not causing death).

Incest can cause the same damages as rape or pedophilia and also in cases where pregnancy occurs, can double lethal mutations into genetic lineages and introduce them into the larger gene pool over time.

Bestiality creates opportunities for persistent and potentially lethal zoonotic (animal-to-human) diseases to get a firm foothold in human populations.

5) Sliders work better than on-off switches if you want helpful mutations.

If the only two answers you can ever get to any question are YES and NO, you have no room for upgrades, sidegrades, or ways of improving or saving a species WTSGD (when the shit goes down).

But if the only two answers you can ever get are YES or NO, you have a specialist species, not a generalist species.

Here’s an example of a basic survival rule:
Fruit of the thurka tree is food.

And here’s the question that rule generates:
MUST the species in question eat the fruit of the thurka tree to survive?

If the species has a YES/NO switch for thurka fruit, then as long as the thurka tree survives, the animal can survive—but if thurka trees die out, then the species, unable to survive without the thurka tree, will die out, too.

If the species has a slider for thurka fruit, the answer will vary by individual—some individuals may be genetically wired to require the fruit of the thurka tree to survive, while others are genetically wired to be able to eat foods other than the thurka tree, and in some cases, individuals of the same species adapted for ranges that only border thurka tree growing zones may not even find the thurka fruit particularly digestible.

The human example for this would be:

• Folks who can easily eat extra-species milk products: cheeses, drinks and baked goods made from the milk of cows, sheep, goats, yaks, horses, etc., without suffering any physical harm from doing so;

• Folks who can marginally eat extra-species milk products, though these are  not an optimal food for them, causing in them clogging of arteries, elevated cholesterol, unhealthy weight gain, and so on;

• Folks who cannot eat extra-species milk products: they are lactose-intolerant and suffer severe repercussions for eating products made from the milk of cows, sheep, goats, yaks, horses, or whatever happens to be available.

Here’s an example of a basic reproductive rule:
Members of the species mate for life.

And here are the questions that rule generates:
If one member of the pair bond dies, can the other member take a new mate?

If this rule and question are on YES/NO switches, when the answer is NO, the species loses an enormous number of possible beneficial mutations by wasting the reproductive viability of young widows/widowers. (I’m using the human term here, but we could be talking about Canada geese or any other species with a one-and-done mating switch as our example).

If this rule is on a slider, as it is with humans, then reproductively viable widows/widowers can find new mates with which to reproduce, keeping their genes in the gene pool.

If most of the members of one gender are wiped out, can the survivors take multiple mates?

When the answer to this question is on a YES/NO switch, then any disease or catastrophe that targets the members of one gender exclusively (war, disease, or other “when the shit goes down” scenarios) could cause the extinction of the species, even if there were enough survivors of the targeted to allow for harem rallying.

If the answer is on a slider, then some members of the species will not reproduce, and their lines will die out. But with harem rallying—where few viable males gather groups of many viable females together and reproduce with them, the species can gain ground and replenish itself, including bringing back through useful mutation variants of the species that pair bond for life.

Once I had my rules in place, I had to figure out the questions for phenotype.

Phenotype (as I noted earlier) is the physical expression of a genetic combination for a specific trait. Here’s a simple example: If your genotype for eye color is “recessive/recessive,” your phenotype will be “blue eyes.”

1. How does humanity maximize beneficial mutations?

2. How do the expressions of our generalist species’ need for diverse helpful mutations (upgrades) present itself in the human sex drive?

BUT ANYWAY…

Let’s move on to humans, who are generalists as a species, and whose genotype and phenotype therefore operate to survive beyond WTSGD (“when the shit goes down,” hereafter exclusively abbreviated as WTSGD).

Back to rule one. Sex is life.

To make sure a species which reproduces by choice, rather than by having a cyclical mating season, DOES reproduce, sex needs to be two things:

• Obsessively compelling.

• And fun.

To make sure people will keep reproducing offspring that can themselves reproduce under all possible environmental changes, it needs to be a third thing as well:

• Variable.

And those variations need to be innate, not learned—meaning that individual people need to be born with their sexual sliders set to different variations (which can be overridden by choice) just to make sure the species keeps all its survival options open.

So with all of that in mind, here are the ten normal human genders I came up with, along with seven non-hardwired variations.

I posit my ten normal variations as phenotypical expressions of genotypical hard-wiring.

Meaning that people are born with their basic sexual desires set, so that when puberty kicks off the full-blown sex drive, individuals are pre-set to desire the gender or genders they desire, and would desire the gender or genders they do with or without societal pressures.

1. I posit that desires are pre-set.

2. I posit that genders exist independent of phenotype.

3. I note that acting on gender is a matter of choice, and that the ability to refrain from acting on gender has very high survival value.

GENDER ONE: Asexual—No sexual interest or activity.

It might seem odd to have non-reproduction be the first variable, but the human generalist genotype operates on sliders, not switches. Therefore, the first normal biological answer to reproduction is NO. No way, no how, not interested, leave me alone.

(We could start at YES, but where humanity is concerned, YES is not the opposite of NO, and you and I have to walk through a lot of variations to get there.)

GENDER TWO: Monosexual—Sex with or sexual interest in only the self.

This is a second normal, essentially non-reproductive, answer on the sliding scale. This variant in bi-functionally hermaphroditic individuals, who have working male and female reproductive sex organs, would result in cloning—in anyone else, it is sexual interest without offspring. But the drives that would allow for reproduction by individuals alone exists in the genotype AND phenotype as an option, if a rare one. In the case of WTSGD, monosex with could preserve the species long enough for individuals to meet each other and engage in sex other individuals that would allow for the return of DNA recombination.

GENDER THREE: Unisexual A—Sex with or sexual interest in only one person of one’s own gender.

Basic phenotype bonding: male/male, female/female, or hermaphrodite/hermaphrodite, but with just that pair bond only, ever. Again, Unisexual A and its most closely related variant Polysexual A appear as non-reproductive options for any but reproductive-capable hermaphrodites, but are necessary wiring variations in a generalist species. Neither is Unisexual A an exclusively human option.

Once the pair bond is consummated, the Unisexual A individual will not search for an alternative if his/her mate is lost.

GENDER FOUR: Unisexual B—Sex with or sexual interest in only with one person of one other gender.

Basic male/female, male/hermaphrodite, female/hermaphrodite pairing, but with just that pair bond only, ever. If the pair bond is consummated, the Unisexual B individual will not search for an alternative if his/her mate is lost.

GENDER FIVE: Polysexual A—Sex with or sexual interest in more than one person of one’s own gender.

Male/male, female/female, hermaphrodite/hermaphrodite. This covers both serial and simultaneous pairings. This is the last of the simple genders.

Polysexual A individuals may attempt to replace lost mates.

GENDER SIX: Polysexual B—Sex with or sexual interest in more than one person of one preferred other gender.

Mostly male/female, and covering both serial and simultaneous pairings; however, is the first of the complex genders, since the individual’s preferred gender could be one of the Unis, either of the other two Polys, or one of the three Pans.

This will not work out well for Unis or Poly As, but it is a broadly effective reproductive strategy for both male and female Poly Bs.

Polysexual B individuals may attempt to replace lost mates.

GENDER SEVEN: Polysexual C—Sex with or sexual interest in multiple partners of multiple other genders.

The Venn diagram of potential partners for an individual Poly C is messy beyond belief, because along with the possibility of, for example, one woman wanting both one other woman and one other man, she could also want one woman alone AND more than one woman together, one man alone and more than one man together, only multiple women at the same time, only multiple hermaphrodites at the same time, only multiple men at the same time, both men and women at the same time, both men and hermaphrodites at the same time, only single serial relationships, but with either men, or hermaphrodites, or women…

Polysexual C individuals can choose from Unis of either gender, Polys of all three genders, and Pans of all three genders.

While a Uni/Poly C relationship would be devastating for the Uni, and a Poly A/Poly C relationship would be deeply unwelcome for a Poly A, they happen a lot.

Poly Cs are wired to look for variety across the board (a reproductive strategy that makes a lot of sense biologically). Those who do are unlikely to interact only with other Poly Cs simply because there are so many other alternatives, and chance brings folks together who may be both deeply compelled to pursue each other while being wildly incompatible.

GENDER EIGHT: Pansexual A—Sex with or sexual interest in ALL genders.

This is YES, version one.

ALL possibilities may be equally enchanting, from pursuing and trying to “convert” asexuals to desiring all variants of multiple partnerings, serially or simultaneously or both.

Pansexual A is as interested and drawn toward appealing individuals who have no interest in his/her gender as he/she is to those who do.

Any individual Pansexual A may prefer serial pairings to simultaneous separate relationships or group encounters, but Pansexual A is equally attracted to  all three sexual phenotypes and to all genders.

GENDER NINE: Pansexual B—Sex with or sexual interest in ALL genders, but with the added compelling drive to act in other or all phenotype roles.

All things true for Pansexual As are true for Pansexual Bs. Additionally, however, while Pansexual Bs may or may not have the necessary phenotype of two working sets of sex organs, but they do have the desire to act in both male and female roles. This wiring is reproductively irrelevant in non-hermaphrodites, but does make possible the slider that would allow Pansexual B hermaphrodites to rebreed a nearly extinct WTSGD.

For generalists, all potential variables MUST be in place and in production “Before the shit goes down,” because not even punctuated evolution, a.k.a. punctuated equilibrium can save a species from extinction if the basic mutations and the mechanisms for creating more are not in place beforehand.

GENDER TEN: Pansexual C—Sex with or sexual interest in ALL genders, but with the added compelling drive to act in only phenotype roles other than ones own.

All things true for Pansexual As are true for Pansexual Cs. However, the Pansexual C individual ONLY wants to act out the phenotypical role for the gender or genders to which he/she does not belong.

This gender seems to me like a cruel trick on any of the three sexual phenotypes, but because I posited both A and B, I have to posit the existence of C as a normal variation. Under the rules for Generalist Survival, all possible variations will be tried, and all variations that do not cause harm either to the species or individuals will be normal.

The Seven Variations

These are short and don’t require much explanation. They are variations because they are ADD-ONS to the ten genders, coexisting with them but completely separate.

Variations of Self-Identification

Homopsychogenous: Individual identifies himself/herself mentally as a member of his or her own sexual phenotype.

Heteropsychogenous: Individual identifies himself/herself mentally as a member of a sexual phenotype not his or her own.

Ambipsychogenous: Individual identifies himself/herself mentally as a member of both male and female sexual phenotypes.

Ochipsychogenous: Individual does not identify mentally as a member of any sexual phenotype.

Variations of Sexual Engagement

Genosexual: Engages in sexual acts solely as a means of reproduction.

Simposexual: Engages in sexual acts exclusively as a means of personal satisfaction. (Personal satisfaction can—but does not necessarily—include concern for the satisfaction of any partner or partners, since making sure partners are satisfied is in itself a form of personal satisfaction.

Ambisexual: Engages in sexual acts both as a means of reproduction and as a means of satisfaction.

Finally, the outcome of the exercise.

First, I liked the details I obtained by working through this worldbuilding exercise enough that I’ll be using it in my Settled Space universe. It fits nicely with a lot of the genetic and nanoviral engineering I’ve set up in the Cadence Drake novels. It also adds depth and logic to social worldbuilding I’ve done for both my Cadence Drake novels and upcoming Longview stories.

Second, I think what I came up with is a valid representation of real-world human sexuality. I may be missing some variants, I may have overlooked some options…but I think I’m on the right track here.

You can read writer questions and comments, and my answers, on this page of my personal website:

http://hollylisle.com/the-ten-normal-human-genders-and-the-seven-variants-an-exercise-in-geek-deep-worldbuilding/

BONUS: Write Your Sample Story

If you’re already a free member of my HowToThinkSideways.com site, you already have the free 3-Week Flash Fiction Class.

If you haven’t yet joined, you can sign up for the class here:

http://howtothinksideways.com/shop/free-three-week-flash-fiction-class/

Either way, to put your worldbuilding to use and get strong stories out of it right away, begin on Lesson 1, and taking any world or universe you’ve developed that you’re particularly happy with, use your worldbuilding materials to answer the weekly lesson questions and write your beginnings, middles, and endings for stories set in and using the best of what you’ve built.

You can use the Flash Fiction discussion boards to discuss your story development with other writers who are going through the same process.

And because this class is permanently accessible to all my students, you can go back through and retake it at any time.

Conclusion

You've been through some work to get to this point, have discovered a lot about your creativity, your interests, your hopes and fears and passions…and you're now the proud owner of at least a handful of worlds of your own.

This is just a beginning. Everything you learn and everything you do, as well as everything you have ever learned or done in the past, becomes fuel you feed into the engines of your stories.

Nothing you learn is wasted. Nothing you try is a failure if you learn something from it.

This book is designed to get wind under your wings as quickly as possible, to get you writing fiction on the first day of your worldbuilding rather than after a year or five of "getting ready."

You're never ready.

That's the strange beauty of writing. You learn your world as you go, just as you do in life. You move forward, you discover new places and new things, you return to old places to find they've changed while you were away.

You make it up as you go along, and you do your best to make it wondrous, and magical.

In writing, however, in contrast to life, if you don't get it right the first time (and I never have, though I came pretty close once) you can go back and put in all the magic you hoped would be there your second time through.

So write and build with joy, dare to find your magic, and allow the wonder of spontaneous discovery to trump that pervasive, gray determination that seeps into writers' minds, suggesting you must pin all your butterflies to boards and label them before you actually show your readers how beautiful they are.

Keep your butterflies in the air, and take your readers into worlds that live and breathe around them.

Holly Lisle

1/16/2014

About the Author

AFTER TWENTY-ISH YEARS OF WRITING full time and selling my work to commercial publishers, I discovered that I was happier and had a lot more fun writing if I published my own work. At the same time, I discovered I also I got paid more regularly, more reliably, and better for doing so.

At the point where you discover a win-win solution to some part of your own life, you have to realize you’d be crazy not to pursue it. I pursued it for about four years in hybrid fashion, while also writing commercially—but reality is that self-publishing just kept on beating commercial publishing in every head-on comparison.

So I quit publishing my work commercially. I can’t say the decision was easy, and I can say it was terrifying, but in July of 2011 I walked away from commercial publishing.

Now I’m picking up the the books of a series I wanted to write, creating the writing courses I haven’t had time for until now, and getting the chance to speak directly to the readers of both my fiction and nonfiction.

If you keep hoping I’ll do a particular story, or book, or course, and I haven’t yet—let me know.

My personal site is:

http://HollyLisle.com

My writers’ classroom and bookstore is:

http://HowToThinkSideways.com

And one final note. I am going it alone. No funding, no advances, no safety net from publishers or anyone else. So if someone gave you a copy of the book you just read, it would help me tremendously if you dropped by the shop and bought your copy.

http://HowToThinkSideways.com/shop/

Cheerfully,

Holly Lisle

AUTHOR’S WORKS

Nonfiction

Create A World Clinic: Worldbuilding Part III

Create A Culture Clinic: Worldbuilding Part II

Create A Language Clinic: Worldbuilding Part I

Create A Plot Clinic: A Step-by-Step Course for the Fiction Writer

Create A Character Clinic: A Step-by-Step Course for the Fiction Writer

HOW TO THINK SIDEWAYS: Career Survival School for Writers (seven-month writing and career course)

HOW TO REVISE YOUR NOVEL: Get the Book You Want from the Wreck You Wrote (five-month writing course)

HOW TO WRITE A SERIES (four-module course, expanding to ten in 2014)

How To Write Page-Turning Scenes: A Step-by-Step Course for the Fiction Writer

How to Find Your Writing Discipline

How To Motivate Yourself

How To Write Dialogue With Subtext

How To Beat Writer’s Block

21 Ways to Get Yourself Writing When Your Life Has Just Exploded

Mugging the Muse: Writing Fiction for Love AND Money

Professional Plot Outline Clinic

Novels

Hunting the Corrigan’s Blood: A Cadence Drake Novel

Warpaint: A Cadence Drake Novel

The Wishbone Conspiracy: A Cadence Drake Novel (coming soon)
Midnight Rain
I See You
Last Girl Dancing
Night Echoes
The Ruby Key: Moon & Sun I
The Silver Door: Moon & Sun II
The Emerald Sun: Moon & Sun III (coming soon)
Talyn: A Novel of Korre
Hawkspar: A Novel of Korre
Fire in the Mist: Arhel I
Bones of the Past: Arhel II
Mind of the Magic: Arhel III
Sympathy for the Devil: Devil’s Point I
The Devil and Dan Cooley (with Walter Spence): Devil’s Point II
Hell on High (with Ted Nolan): Devil’s Point III
Minerva Wakes
Memory of Fire: World Gates I
The Wreck of Heaven: World Gates II
Gods Old and Dark: World Gates III
Diplomacy of Wolves: Secret Texts I
Vengeance of Dragons: Secret Texts II
Courage of Falcons: Secret Texts III
Vincalis the Agitator (Secret Texts Prequel)
Glenraven (with Marion Zimmer Bradley)
In The Rift: Glenraven II (with Marion Zimmer Bradley)
When the Bough Breaks (with Mercedes Lackey)
Mall, Mayhem and Magic (with Chris Guin)
The Rose Sea (with S.M.Stirling)
Curse of the Black Heron
Thunder of the Captains (with Aaron Allston)
Wrath of the Princes (with Aaron Allston)

Singles

Light Through Fog

Rewind

Strange Arrivals: Ten Tiny, Twisty Tales

Stories in Collections

“Light Through Fog,” The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance

“4EVR,” The Mammoth Book of Ghost Romance

“Last Thorsday Night,” The Mammoth Book of Time Travel

“Knight and the Enemy,” The Enchanter Reborn

“Armor-ella,” Chicks in Chainmail

“A Few Good Men,” Women at War

DEDICATION

For Matt

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, I’d like to thank my editor, Matt Turano, who   found the places where I wandered, was vague, was confusing, left things out, and wrote any number of sentences that would have left my readers wandering in the wilderness with out food or water for weeks on end. His careful attention to detail made sure I did not kill my beta testers with this course, (though I may have wounded a few).

Next, any writing course that covers such a vast topic as worldbuilding in a systemic fashion requires beta testing: I know what works inside my brain, after all, but I have no way of making sure my systems will translate well until I can test my way of working on other folks’ brains.

So my deepest thanks to the writers who went through  Create A World Clinic first, and did their worldbuilding my way...and who then reported back with both the places where I lost them, and the places where I got them home.

If you got a good writing world (or several) from working through this course, you can—along with me—thank the following people:

Greg Miranda
Jean Schara
Kari Wolfe
Kelly Guerra
Lisa Thierbach
Marissa Kahn
Maureen Tanafon
Peg Fisher
Terry O'Carroll
Tom Vetter

They struggled greatly so you didn’t have to.

Finally, thank you for purchasing Create A World Clinic. It was for you that I wrote this course—to help you figure out how to reach your writing goals and find your writing joy.

I wish you the best and happiest of times writing within your own amazing worlds.

COPYRIGHT

Published by Holly Lisle,

OneMoreWord Books

ISBN: 978-1-62456-014-9

Cover Design: Holly Lisle/ Matt Turano

Cover Art: Treasure Key, from Bigstock © Scott

Holly’s Author Photo: © Holly Lisle

Copyright © 2014 by Holly Lisle

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

DISCLAIMER AND/OR LEGAL NOTICES:

The information in this course has been built from my life and experiences, and it is what works for me. While I have made every effort to translate the decidedly quirky workings of one human mind into a process that will be applicable and accessible to other human minds, I cannot guarantee that this course will work for you, or that my processes will be applicable to your needs and purposes. Nor can I guarantee your success. This course is not intended as a source of legal, accounting, medical or other advice, and is written for information purposes only.  While every attempt has been made to verify the information in this course, mistakes happen, and I make them. I will not assume responsibility for errors, inaccuracies, or omissions. I reserve the right to alter and update this course as my processes change, as I learn new things, and as I improve existing methods.

How to Get Your Worksheets

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IF YOU DO NOT YET HAVE A FREE GENERAL ACCOUNT ON MY WRITING SITE, get one here:

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If you already have an account, (or if you just finished creating one)…

Sign in to your Writer’s Boot Camps Account here:

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Once you’re signed in, click the link below, or type it into your browser to reach your Create A World Clinic download page.

http://howtothinksideways.com/classrooms/create-a-world-clinic-class/create-a-world-clinic-class-worksheets/

How To Get All The Goodies If You Bought This Course Somewhere Else

The price of this course—no matter where you purchased it—includes:

- Eleven demo videos for Geek-Deep worldbuilding and accompanying worksheets,

- Downloadable demo maps including both flat maps and fully built-out 3-D Minecraft Maps,

- Free access to lifetime updates of this course in .mobi, .epub, and printable .pdf formats.

If you purchased this course from another site—Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or someplace else that I’ve added to my market list after completing writing this—you can still get all the extras.

To do this, first create your free account here:

https://howtothinksideways.com/create-your-free-general-membership-account/

OR

Log into your existing account here:

https://howtothinksideways.com/login/

Get the username and email address attached to your account, and create a new HELP DESK ticket here:

http://novelwritingschool.com/support/

Let me know your account username and email address.

Then copy and paste your receipt from wherever you purchased the course into the ticket.

I’ll add you to the full version of the class so you don’t miss anything.

Cheerfully,

Holly