[ SECRET POST #3238 ]

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⌈ Secret Post #3238 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 043 secrets from Secret Submission Post #463.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

For those writers who are creating new worlds, especially fantasy writers, what kind of tools do you use for world-building, if any? Do you draw out maps and such, or use any program for that? Do you try to figure out the more realistic details, like climate, flora and fauna and such?

How about for designing characters? Do you draw them, write in-depth bios, design characters using digital tools, or anything? I recently tried to design a few of my characters using MakeHuman but I'm not really good enough yet to get them looking quite how I envisioned.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

I probably should plan things out more but mostly I make it up as I go along. I might sketch out a rough map, but I'm a terrible artist and it's really just a reference point. If there's say, a room or a building that's prominently featured, I might draw its layout so I can better imagine how characters move around in it during a scene.

For realistic details, I try to maintain a logical structure in my universe like there is for the real world. So... a peasant who lives out in the middle of nowhere in a tiny village isn't going to have a very rich or varied diet. They're going to need to spend a significant amount of their day either farming, dealing with livestock and/or some combination of hunting/foraging with less time foe leisure activities. Their house will be very small and probably somewhat primitive. Their clothing will be practical, not new, and they won't have more than one or two outfits. They might not even have a horse, unless it's a plough horse. Etc. etc.

Basically I keep real world rules for How Stuff Works in mind when I write my fictional ones.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[tabaqui]

Hrmmmmmm...no? I mean - I'm not an artist, and that would be an exercise in futility. I mostly do a lot of research. Research weather and tides and how people catch food and make things and whatnot, and adapt that to my world.

Or if I'm going modern, I think about how the world *works*, and try to insert those things into the narrative without it becoming a big lecture. The worst thing about building a whole new world is building it based on some specific 'thing' that you think is really neat, but not thinking it through and the world doesn't actually *work*. Worlds have to work, to be believable.

I might look at maps or sketch something by hand to make sure I'm seeing it properly in my head, but as a rule, I don't use physical representations of anything (or artistic, I guess) to help me world-build, I just...build it in my head.

I will figure out a character's history or something, yes, but generally only jot down a few notes so I don't forget key dates or something, but I never do anything 'in depth' or with tons of details.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

"The worst thing about building a whole new world is building it based on some specific 'thing' that you think is really neat, but not thinking it through and the world doesn't actually *work*. Worlds have to work, to be believable."

Thiiiiiiis. So many authors don't seem to get this, they just want to put in neat details without thinking about whether or not those details make any sense. So you get people traipsing through a tropical swamp while wearing leather and armor and you know, not dying of heat stroke or having their clothes rot and rust to pieces. Or people who work at minimum wage jobs and can still magically afford an amazing apartment in a major city.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[tabaqui]

Yup, exactly. I don't care if there is 100 percent accuracy about *every single thing*, but you can't have a huge city with no discernible means of sewage removal or food intake, stuff like that.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

Exactly. I find it kind of frustrating when writers shrug off those details as unimportant or no big deal. It feels lazy to me. I'm not going to insist on 100% historical accuracy, but come on, at least TRY to have your world make sense.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[cbrachyrhynchos]

So, Tolkien, Lovecraft, Le Guin, Moorcock, and Lewis were all doing it wrong.

It's bullshit of course. Ethnography requires over a thousand hours of data collection to understand the lives of groups consisting of a few hundred. To say that any one person can fully understand a *world* is ridiculous.

You create believability by creating compelling characters in compelling conflict. This could happen in worlds ranging from a single room to a universe. The rest is window dressing.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[tabaqui]

I'm sorry, what are you babbling about? You comment re: Tolkein, etc., makes no sense to me at all.

You can have the most 'compelling' character ever, but if the world they live in just *does not work*, the story is lacking, to me, and you have failed in your job of world-building. Simple as that.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

What does it mean for you for a world not to work?

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Tolkien's worlds do not work. Lewis's worlds do not work. Le Guin's world do not work. Moorcock's worlds do not work. Pratchett's world gloriously does not work.

If you have elves, your worlds will not work. If you have dragons, your worlds will not work. If you have magick, your worlds will not work. Ifyou halve alternate universe, your worlds will not work, and let's not get into how large chunks of fantasy has treated theology post-Gygax.

Unless you treat their stories as fucking stories, then they do work.

In fact, unless you're some sort of omnipotent scholar, your worlds will not work because the humanities are too fucking complex for generalists.

You can have the most 'compelling' character ever, but if the world they live in just *does not work*, the story is lacking, to me, and you have failed in your job of world-building. Simple as that.

Perhaps you should get the fuck out of a genre which has always put story first, and find something more your speed like census data or actuarial tables. Or perhaps just read Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics on how putting history or language ahead of story is a big mistake.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[tasogare_n_hime]

I do a pretty even mix of writing and drawing. I've drawn maps with photoshop, I tried a fantasy map maker thing once, but I could not figure it out. For characters I get a much better result starting out with pencil and paper, scanning it, and finishing the drawings with GIMP(version 2.6), and Photoshop. This is the first I've heard of MakeHuman what's it like?

Writing stuff I start out with very basic notes on the idea, and then flesh them out. I add and changing things as I put more thought into it.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

MakeHuman is basically a program like when you're designing a character for a video game (like Sims, or Elder Scrolls, Dragon Age, etc). There are sliders to change proportions, sizes, shape, etc. I like it in theory (and it's also free!) but the one I downloaded didn't come with much for hairstyles of clothes, and I'm having trouble figuring out how to design my own. Still, kind of fun.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[dani_phantasma]

I draw out maps and then try to come up with world details as I build up the story and the more I work on it, the more things come up.

As for characters I build them along with the story I want to tell. I draw them a lot, especially since my art skills have been improving. I also make them in the Sims character creator at some point.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[iceyred]

I think of a cool place I've visited that would make a good story setting. Currently writing a story set in a S.C. swamp. It's easier and more fun than making something up wholesale.

For characters, my characters are better if I think of their motivations and how they would react to situations, rather then how they look or some past that will never be referenced in-story.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

Sure, but how a character looks surely speaks to their personality and function in life and their past informs how they'd react to things in the present time.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[iceyred]

Maybe. But when I focused on that stuff I got overly involved in it and it ended up not making my writing any better.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, I see. I don't overly focus on it, I just keep those details in mind as part of the bigger picture. It helps keep characterization consistent for me.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[cbrachyrhynchos]

1. What is the conflict?
2. What is the story?
3. Who are the characters?
4. What details are necessary to sell the conflict, story, and characters?

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[herpymcderp]

I've used a few world building checklists online. They take a lot more time than I really care to put in though.

What actually helps most is googling locations on earth for inspiration for settings. If I need a cool place for a scene to take place in I look for structures like old soviet submarine bases or airplane graveyards or other really interesting abandoned places.

There's nothing better for inspiration than finding something someone has already built in real life and tweaking that concept for your own purposes.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

I've drawn maps, so I can sort of visualise how my place feels like and approximately how long it will take my character to walk from point A to point B and how point C is only a 6 hour ride from there again. I also have in mind the climate and flora (though I personally haven't spent much time thinking on the fauna as it haven't been relevant for my writing yet, though I probably should) I've just used photoshop or just drawing on paper for the maps. I also recently found an app for both Android and iOS called Sketchbook (from Autodesk) and the free version of that is pretty neat. I've even bought it for my iPad.

I can't really draw though, so I can't do that for my characters, at least not how their faces look and such. For that I mostly either write down facial features, hair, body type etc. or look up models. I could have used actors or other famous people, but that throws me off personally as I just get reminded of said famous person, so fairly unknown models are better in that regard. http://www.supermodels.nl/ is good for this when it comes to women as there are a wide range of models on there. I've also tried photomanips to get somewhat of the look I want, but I'm not too good at that either.

I also personally like to look to history to get a gist of how things people did without technology X and things like that, though without making my entire universe pseudo-medieval. Just stealing a couple of elements and ideas from era A and some others from era B. I am a huge history geek though so I just think this kind of research is fun. (Like, I have a book on underwear in Britain from the middle ages and until the 1900-somethings just for writing reasons). I also like looking at fashion to get inspiration.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

Honestly I just bring as much to the table as I can and pick and choose what I like and where it goes.

Like fashion. I'd draw dozens of sketches of things that look cool to me, and then I'd place it. What's street fashion like? High society clothes? Business attire?

i'm def a visual person so i draw everything

[(Anonymous)]

I generally start with the state of said world, like if it's under attack or if it rains so much whole landmasses are underwater for a season or something. Then I think of how that'd affect society and how things could've been before. So...more realistic details, I guess? Particular places I may detail in writing, some relevant to the plot, others just for, well, world-building.

As for characters...I generally write some scene of whatever pops into my head, no censoring. I tweak it to fit the world or scrap them, and if I think they'd fit, I draw them and develop them more.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[cbrachyrhynchos]

The central problems I have with "world-building" as its become lately are:

1. First, the humanities are hard, and unless you're going to specialize and put in the equivalent of a thesis, you're not going to do justice to more than a small slice of it.

2. Worldbuilding advice given on forums regarding historical and cultural settings is almost universally bad or overgeneralized, spouting many of the same half-truths and myths you can get from the history channel. (Primogeniture wasn't universally important, kings were not autocrats, the longbow wasn't the only thing that destroyed chivalry.)

3. I pick up too many books in the genre that have lush description but bad structure, bad conflict, bad character development, books that go everywhere in the world but do nothing, and say nothing. Which is about what happened to Science Fiction when the "hard" camp was dominant that the "big ideas" became little more than a shower of small ideas showing off the author's mastery of this or that little corner of physics.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not a writer, but I wish writers who want to create fantasy worlds with maps would brush up a bit on geology. I get tired of reading about characters who seem like they're wandering around a sound stage because their world does not project any sense of *physical* history.

This thing that was on NOVA last week is the kind of thing writers should think about:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/making-north-america.html#north-america-origins

It's not necessary to design a world that is 100% geologically correct all the time and fill out every detail of its geologic history, but it would really help to think about things like "How did these mountains form?" rather than just scattering mountain ranges wherever it seems convenient.

(I also get tired of seeing "impassible mountains/desert/swamp" on the edges of maps all the time. Unless being really isolated is relevant to the story, it's not necessary to physically cut off the region from the rest of the planet.)

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

I admit this bothers me a tiny bit as well. Earth has an incredible amount of diversity when it comes to geological features and different environments, but sometimes people don't seem to have a very good grasp of how geology works or what sorts of terrain you'd find where and what that means.