[ SECRET POST #3238 ]

[case]

⌈ 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

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

[tabaqui]

Yup, same. You gotta put a little effort into it!

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

I once betaed for a friend who was writing a medieval-ish AU and she didn't want to bother with ANY research whatsoever. She just wanted the trimmings, even though it didn't really make sense and some of the stuff she thought was historically accurate was just... culled from romance novels and her own imagination. All of those details and mechanics of how the universe worked was getting in the way of her OTP smooshy time!

In the end, I didn't say anything. That was hard. :(

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[tabaqui]

Meh, yes. I totally get wanting fluffy fun-times with a knight in armor and a feisty peasant or *whatever*, but i really hate a story set in historical (Earth) times that utterly ignore actual *facts* of those times.

I just...don't enjoy reading those stories at all. I try my best to do as much research as possible on things that i *can* research, and freely admit when i fudge something for the sake of having the story actually happen. But man, i will *work* to make that 'fudging' happen as seldom as possible.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

I just...don't enjoy reading those stories at all.

Can I ask - serious question - why don't you enjoy it? What is the particular reason that you find it unenjoyable?

again serious question, just trying to understand where you're coming from

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[tabaqui]

Because, to me, a story is much more interesting and fun and satisfying to read when you can make your story work without hand-wavey exceptions or work-arounds.

(Perhaps one of the reasons most of Teen Wolf has irritated the bejeezus out of me. They ignore their own laws and lore, they forget what has gone before, they ignore realistic outcomes/fallout/consequences in favor of *story*!!, and because they do that, the stories just *don't make sense* and it really gets on my nerves.)

A really well-written story that fudge a few details or something is fine, but one that wants to have knights in armor diving into a lake and not drowning is just...meh. Or people riding horses *all day long* and then not feeding them anything but grass for a couple hours while they sleep. For *weeks*. Please - three sentences about grain rations will really help that! An aside by a character acknowledging they may very well kill their horses if they don't rest them would work wonders!

I'm not asking for an exhaustive treatise on long-distance trekking and horse care, but a nod to the fact that horses are ruminants who graze for *hours* to get the nutrition they need and can't actually go for days and weeks on nothing but a pile of hay at the end of the day.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

You weren't asking me, but since I feel the same as tabaqui, I'll give you my take on it as well.

I don't enjoy fluffy fun stories that pay zero attention to historical detail because if I can pick up on inaccuracies (and I'm not a scholar so if I notice a mistake, it's probably a big one), it interrupts my reading and I sit there and go, "Wait a second, that's not right..." It yanks me right out of the story I'm trying to immerse myself in. I'll never lose myself in the fic or book the way I want to because I'll be stopping every second paragraph and finding another mistake.

The other part of it is that it feels really, really lazy. Research has never been easier. You want to know what kind of breakfast rich people ate in Victorian times? You can Google it in like, ten seconds. So if I read a story where a Victorian family is sitting down to a hearty meal of Egg McMuffins, that annoys me. Authors who can't or don't spare the time for research aren't likely to invest the time to write a good story, IMO.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt - Same. I'm not a historian by any means so I figure my standards aren't that high. I just want things to look and sound mostly right in terms of historical details and I don't enjoy it if an author has clearly fudged everything (even really simple stuff) because I just feel... I don't know, cheated somehow. A great story with an eye for historical accuracy is a thing of beauty! Why don't more authors aim for this?

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

That's great in stories where historical realism is part of the tone the author is aiming for.

But that's not what all stories are doing.

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

[tabaqui]

For it to not makes sense. I'm not talking about magic, which does not exist in this world and which is something that is purest escape fantasy.

I'm talking about sci-fi worlds or fantasy worlds (without magic) that are patterned on Medieval Earth, or post-zombie-apocalypse worlds, things like that. If you have five hundred people living off canned beans for ten years, well...that just doesn't *work*. If you have Medieval farmers who spend most of their day trying to woo someone rather than actually *farm*, that doesn't work. If you have a space station where there is no recycling and no conservation of resources and no worries about radiation that just doesn't *work*.

Obviously, this is subjective and a lot of people won't care, but I really hate a world written by an author that wants so much for 'specific thing' to be prominent that they completely ignore how incredibly unworkable and weird the scenario is.

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

[tabaqui]

Well, you got nasty quick. So, bye-bye, any kind of discussion.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

With all respect, I'm not sure your earlier line about "babbling" reads as particularly friendly.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[tabaqui]

Perhaps not, but it certainly isn't openly hostile. And the comment *did* seem like babbling because it made no sense to me.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[cbrachyrhynchos]

All of the authors mentioned were story-first writers. Quite explicitly so in the case of Tolkien. Lovecraft's fantasy is openly surreal and isn't supposed to make objective sense.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

Wow. This was unnecessarily belligerent.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

Holy shit dude.

She's talking about internal consistency, not a complete lack of fantastical elements. Way to take something hyper-literally and then go batshit over it.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

It's not just a question of magical elements in the story. It's also a question of what you mean by "internal consistency" and to what extent that matters for the quality of a story. And, like, this is a central and long-running argument in the genre. It is, I think, a problem of the genre that the importance of mechanical internal consistency is regarded as being of such fantastically great importance - almost to the exclusion of anything else. It is a major problem. And I think that is what cbar's post was speaking to.

I can't speak to the tone but the content of cbar's argument is extremely reasonable.

Re: Writers: World-building and character designing

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not sure you meant to sound this aggressive and take it to the point of a personal attack, but this was out of line.