BUILDING WORLDS

World Building’s one of the most underrated essentials of storytelling, and if you do it right,  one of the most invisible. In my personal opinion the holy trinity of storytelling World Building and Character Development are top tier with Plot as the tiny lagging puppy running keep up. Character and World Building are what draws you in to a story, and want to revisit it again later, When a story is working, Plot is merely the tick-tock of events in the service of those two. But, we’ve been an a two-decades long cycle of high concept/plot narratives that have crowded out the other two, leading us a seemingly endless raft of spectacular, and saccharine stories that fill seats in movie theaters for a week, that then become empty all the weeks to follow. Sugar highs without long term value.

 The seeds for that value come from Character and they come from World Building. Here’s a list of what you can do to understand the absolute core value of these two building block for your story. Here’s goes something!

This is the first helpful rule to wrestle down and start to get into good World Building- recognize that at its core, in a room with two characters talking… it’s the third character in that room. For the most part, it’s the quietest one in any space. It delivers itself through descriptives in prose writing, maybe having some effect on the characters, maybe not. It exists to make for the characters a place to be, things to do, threats or rewards. It’s the floor the characters stand on, the city they wander through, the jungle they fly through, or the ocean they drown in. If you think about it as a character, spend the same amount of time writing backstory and all the little myriad of nuances and detail you should apply to your characters. All those little bits you add, the hitch in your character’s walk from a childhood injury, the drunken parents that make your heroine trauma triggered when trying to run the bar she owns, or the clothing, complexion, racial and gender identity… all those little bits bits we write and build and then mostly leave behind as a secret reservoir for our character development and motivation, you can and should do with World Building. Think of it as a person who is a place- the most obvious example of this combined in comics being expressed by the transvestite sentient road Danny the Street, from Grant Morrison’s DOOM PATROL.

The point being that it matters a TON that you both hold the world that you build as central to your story, and make it a quiet presence in any room they occupy. Whether its the Iron Throne in the Red Keep, The Mos Eisley smuggler’s bar on Tattooine, Hogwart’s School in the Wizarding World, or everywhere in Dune. World Building is everywhere and no one, and as a result weird as that might seem, the most important character who never says a thing in any scene.

World Building also builds characters, and ity can build plot. You can of course tell a story in a closed black box with two characters talking, a wordless place seemingly, or an world-leaning where to enter the story always via the sense of setting and place first. Blade Runner’s opening flight in and across Los Angeles, the opening narrative sprawl of Mega City 1 in Dredd, and just about every single scene in Andor, what I might now consider to be the absolute pinacale example of a World/Character Building in on-screen storytelling. It infuses it’s sense of place into every character and plot opportunity. It shows us that the place can be the character and the plot purpose, and start a cycle of never ending ever-self-feeding growth. It’s stories like these that can become places to return to rather than just mere tales to retell. You’ll find if you’re painting your worlds or writing them, a kind of a meta creative moment that you can pass through where the process of world building starts to run on its own accord. You get ideas for meaning of existing notions or new broadening of the society you’re building the critical mass of some creative enterprise thresholds and you as the creator start to become responsive to the creation telling you what it wants to be. That’s when you know you’re doing something right. It is likely to be the only indicator to cheer you on in the lonely or collaborative pursuit of making a story- this sense of a third voice in the room.

So back to Andor for a moment, and I of course recommend anyone who is interested in story regardless of their Star Wars interest, or lack as an example of a million things done well all at once. But more specifically it adhere’s to one of my favorite altruisms of making comics: every panel should tell you something new– the rest will take care of itself. Each scene should advance the narrative, each vista should grow the world. You never build the stage and then forget about it and perform upon it- this kind of level of world building succeeds because it is in constant growth. It delivers meaning that imbues purposes that gives rise to connection with the audience. Once you have them, you can then literally take them anywhere, but keep feeding the world building into the plot, make the place thr story and you will have an audience having full one real and deeply felt emotional reactions to what you’re a doing. You may be the conductor, but the orchestra is the story and the world you build with it, and you can alter the course of lives with such a combination.

In my hometown medium for storytelling World Building in this medium is a natural. You’ve got an entire new array of localities to build out your worlds regardless of what might be mentioned in a script here. The full panoply of resources are there and it’s a monstrous crime to not utilize it in each and every panel were appropriate.  In comics, you should approach the world building with a two pronged attack, reliant mostly on it being expressed visually rather than through the writing. Though there should always be a little bit of that too. Comics is unique as a storytelling medium in that unlike film or tv, it uses visual images and the written word to tell it’s story without the benefit of time as a universal presence. (The reader is the timekepper of comics- bespoke to each individual experience who reads it. It’s why it’s the only book medium that is never intended to be read aloud, or synchronized with narration or a soundtrack).

Since World Building does it’s best work in the background, you can say show the scope of Metropolis that Superman flies through without having to bog down your story by describing it. It’s one of the reasons comics is a terrifically powerful medium for creative sci-fi and fantasy world building- the inherent opportunity to vamp it is a flex of the medium, and one of it’s greatest assets. You can see this in any Moebius comic, or anything written by Alan Moore, and even Chris Ware or Dan Clowes. It’s an easier way to learn how to start building worlds visually without leaning to hard on also having to learn deft prose to carry that water. Once you the value of the lesson, you can bring that skillset to any medium you like- and another reason why learning to make good comics is the best possible way to express anything narrative or narrative adjacent in any other medium next.

I mentioned the idea of background before as we do when we develop characters. I first really learned the value of that in a writing class I had in college where we spent the entire first semester, developing and crafting a single character before we spent the second semester writing a story involving them in it. We had to bring in an article of clothing the character might wear, we walked in a circle to physicalize how that character might move- aggressive and commanding, meek and humble, broken and limping, quiet and unassuming? All of this can and should be directly translated into your World Building. Think about how the bus smells your main character is riding in, the potholes in the road it rumbles over, the clank of joining plates as it ramps up an old bridge and the vista the view from that bridge offers before the decent into the noise and tumult of the pedestrians and traffic filling the streets below. Be sure to make everything a choice and everything with a reason, and then bury that reason unless there’s a significance to the character or even the plot, that dictates a need to express it.

The idea is to make the universe your creating, whether its the inside of a single room in Hitchcock’s ROPE, or the vast multicultural landscapes in Valérian and Laureline’s universe as crafted by Pierre Cristin and Jean-Claude Mézières rich and informed, and for the most part secreted in the background of any scene. Make everyplace a place, every room or setting your characters move through present and accountable to a logic and understanding that affirms its realness by that pre-written research and development. If you’re doing this right, you will end up discovering your world as you write it. Much of the world building in the DUNE books, (and yes I will keep returning to these as I hold them up as one of the greatest examples of World Building to scale ever in the history of western writing), is expressed through the quiet interior whispers of the character’s minds… the unusual incongruity of the Fremen’s internal tribal tenderness and feral violence, or the dulled senses of the overly pampered ruling elite versus the brined and cold rain soaked lives of the whale-fur fisherman of Lankiveil. If you do it by hitting it too literally you get the plodding lumbering effort to muscle through the SILMARILLION versus the lyrical light footfalls of the story of THE HOBBIT or THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

Our perception is one of quick assertions, and filling in later with presumptions int he real world, be sure to exploit that feature of our perception when you’re World Building. You don’t need to tick through every librarian’s detail of the lecture hall your character’s giving a speech in, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to if the story requires it. You don;t have to show everything for everything to be felt. The reader or viewer can fill in the rest the way that is so successful in Tobe Hooper’s TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE or the flitting edges of the Black Lodge in David Lynch and Mark Frost’s TWIN PEAKS. Remember magic shows work because of our presumptive perception, your job as storytellers is literally the same, and with much more meaningful results- don’t ever forget to use these tools, often and with elegance.

The language and patois of the Belters versus the Inners in the Expanse novels, the wet click and whirs of the Spacing Guild officials in Dune, the volcanic reds and methane fogs and darkness of Mustafar, or the regal vacation vistas of Naboo of in the Star Wars stories. Just because you can’t smell or taste a book or a movie doesn’t mean you should ignore these important senses in your World Building. Luke and Han wincing at the smell of the trash compactor, the wet dreary noodles served int he streets of LA in Blade Runner, or the luxurious tactile sensations of royal luxury in period dramas, and their opposite can be secret ways to infuse your story with a richness and sense of the real that can launch your story and enrich your characters in ways that will literally surprise you as a creator. We often assume the real world is filled with a lot of rich and endless detail, and it is, but we don’t actually experience most of that on a daily basis. We make assumptions as our ancient hunter-species’ perception diagnoses and red-assesses every room or space we inhabit.

Show the world building through how a character reacts to a sense of smell your reader can’t otherwise sense, sounds and tacticle events they can;t otherwise here. it’s our job to cast as complete an illusion as possible that these circumstances and characters are real enough, despite the obvious artiface, to trick them into believing they are real enough to care for. So don;t ignore half the sense toolkit to get them there.

We can’t hear music in a comic or a prose novel, but we can be made to begin hearing it in our heads by how it’s described, how the character experiences it, the same way we know a chef in a restaurant made a delicious zarzuela de mariscos from a distance, or an errant fart in a newsroom we can’t smell: we see thought the prose how it affects those that in that particular world, can smell it. The sense of muted sounds and ringing in your ears after a bomb goes off in your story, the crunch of fresh snow underfoot as you flee Jack Torrence’s axe in the hedge maze at the Overlook Hotel… these little bits of world building, just touched upon expand the dimensions of your story, raise the stakes in a moment of action and lend value to a place that may soon be lost. It invites us to feel more when we can trick the reader into thinking it’s there when really it’s just words or words and pictures on paper, the same way we can affect a viewer emotionally by imbuing such a rich character into a portrait, that the Mona Lisa becomes the world’s most famous painting despite it also being one of the smallest and least interesting. This is because World zBuilding is Character.

If World Building is the silent additional character in the room, it exercises itself as a stabilizer so characters can run amok freely within it. It is where the plot unfolds, but sometimes it can also be the thing that upends both and becomes the central thrust. Every apocalyptic story is an example of this. You can also exercise pairing the changes of charcter with the changes of the world they live in- coming of age stories do this naturally, morphing the world the character lives in in harmony with the growing up and forward, or again, provide a persistent and better and more understandable world the character can come to reconcile themselves with. Or, in opposition in the case of Taxi Driver where the broken world and depravity is the motivator for the character, and what Travis Bickle rages against.

The sound of the breeze and silence int he world as Lois’ car dies in the desert again, after Superman turns back time to save her from being buried in dirt from a nuclear weaponed crevasse. The birds chirping and cellphones ringing as the first signal of success after the Avengers undid Thanos’ finger snap. The creaking of the wood floor, and swinging of the single lightbulb int he basement after Vera Miles discovers Norman Bates’ mom in Psycho. These alterations to a world laid out deftly and subtly can be as valuable as the thunderclap is to the lightening strike during a storm. One of the most recent and most profound expressions of this is Neo in the hallway after he finally comes to realize the full scope of himself as THE ONE in The Matrix: he flexes his newfound powers, and the walls of the hallways around him bend and flex in response to him. It expresses power on a level no one else int he story has because they can’t affect the World around them as he can. It does this quietly and without vamping in front of the character to do so. Let the sunrise come, invite the quiet at the end of the world, let a presume reality of a place alter as a result of the actions of the story and you will have bought yourself the loyalty and trust in you as a storyteller that is essential to making your story live. In the spirit of always teaching us something new about the story, also remember to do that same service to your characters, and plot. World Building is a rich soil to grow this from.

The hardest trick in all of this is best summed up in my over used example of Dorothy and the Wizard in Frank L Baum’s Oz books. As a writer you need to try and experience your story as your characters do, and your readers/viewers- as if for the first time, every time you write it. It’s also fun to get lost in your story, to let it take over and wise also to allow it to start telling you how it wants to go. But you also need to be the Wizard who knows what lies behind the curtain, who can list the story bible and plot points, express the various regions of Oz and how the yellow brick road ties all the various kingdoms together into a nation. You need to be the dreamer and the accountant at the same time, and luckily can fail at the accounting part more than the dreaming part because that’s what editors are literally there to do for you if you get lost, or fall down rabbit holes. Like a host at a party your primary job is top make sure everyone is having a good time, your good time is a secondary thing, and if you’re doing your job right, far lesser compared to the partygoers. So don;t get too indulgent in expressing your details or showing off your vast universe that fascinates you. Make your World Building a relevancy, without making it the star of the stage.

You don’t need to use every toy you make in the world, but you do need to make the toys to fill the world with. World Building and character construction are the most rewarding and engaging parts of storytelling, but they will and should take up the most of your time in the story you craft. The thing that makes the world of Star Trek so endearing generations on are its themes and its rich and vast world it inhabits. It grows with its times while staying rooted to its core ethos. It makes a place a viewer wants to return to as a familiar home cooked meal is as a comfort against the more incomprehensible world outside. Character is the other landscape to conquer that does this. These two are why Sherlock Homes endures, or Shakespeare never grows old centuries on after the man has turned to ash from the grinding wheel of time. It’s these twin pillars that make a story speak to us on an emotional level, throughout our lives, and if done properly, allows World Building and Character to feed and support each other. A clever plot twist or reveal can garner attention on the outset, but comes at a cost to this overall and reduces the life expectancy of your story to days and weeks instead of decades and centuries. Not every story forgotten through time is lost because it failed to craft grand World Building or Character Development, but every one that dis, does so because of this being done well and fully. APOCALYPSE NOW is a living relic of a place that may never have existed exactly as told, but has become the reality we now can revisit again and again to become the reality we came to see. The music and sound and wildness of that burning landscape endures because it is alive and ferociously present, and makes us see that we cannot experience that story without walking away feeling like the world we were just in was a living real character we also were made to love by it just being there, when behind the scenes the Wizard was responsible enough to be there to tell that character well.

So get out there and make some messes, grow a universe, obliterate a neighborhood. Make a drag-queen sentient street something that makes sense, and makes us feel for it when it hurts or is attacked. Spin worlds and live within in them so rich you can;t help but invite others to join you. It’s where you grow your legacy as a storyteller. It’s where you find succor from the storm of the world outside of the ones you craft. It’s where eternity is.