Ah, writing a new world: drawing strange landscapes,
giving life to fantastic creatures, constructing societies… Sounds fun, right? Liberating?
Heady even? It is, but it comes with a price. Lack of constraints can easily trip
the unwary fabulist and the derived enjoyment has given speculative fiction a
bad reputation: it’s escapism, fluff, too much fun to be of any real
consequence…
Well pffft! Let me tell you the dark little secret: even
the most grounded and realist writer of fiction (and a lot of so-called
non-fiction) creates a world that is, be it ever so slightly, different from
reality. ALL fiction is fictional, it’s only a question of degrees.
What’s more, inventing other worlds is a fundamental
aspect of human intelligence. Margaret Atwood posits that the ability is within
us from infancy, that the limited confines of the crib make us imagine an
elsewhere, that then our first encounter with death forces us to confront the
idea of an after-world. Then we grow up, we forget… but we keep doing it
unconsciously, for framing reality with our values often distorts it.
Let’s get back to writing a Fantasy world. Not all
writers of Fantasy feel the need to do this. The basic tenet of the genre only
asks that we naturalize the supernatural, and this reality has proven most
accommodating: over the centuries, authors have dropped in hordes of wizards,
vampires, werewolves, witches, gods, aliens, and so on, without readers batting
an eyelash.
So how does a new world come into being? It’s a well-known
fact that there are two sorts of writers: the ones who plan their story in
advance (planners) and the ones who let the story write itself (pantsers). Typically,
a planner has outlined all the parameters of their universe before writing the
first sentence. Me, I’m the other type. I didn’t realize I was setting up an Elsewhere
until I was quite far into the story, it just kinda… happened. Who’s right? Who
knows? The Church likes to profess that God has a plan, but if you ask me, it
all makes a lot more sense if you think of God as the create-as-you-write sort.
Jokes aside, whatever kind of world creator you turn out
to be, there will come a point when you need to stop and think about your creation,
define its rules. This is when you must start taking your readers into
consideration, for a fictional universe cannot be anything but incomplete: if
it is born in the writer’s imagination, it is fulfilled in the reader’s. The
latter has to be able to penetrate it, believe it. In the name of what some
call “suspension of disbelief” or “impression of reality”, this world will need
to possess a structure somewhat similar to the primary reality and a coherent
equation of cause and effect. And while these concepts are important for any
work of fiction, they are absolutely essential to any work touching on the
supernatural.
Then you will need to think about your aims as an
author, and if you don’t know what these are, it might mean digging deep into
your unconscious. Fantasy has the potential to be didactic and moralizing: it
simplifies life and by doing so, allows an author to enlarge society’s defects
and draw the reader’s attention to real problems by changing their setting and
magnifying them in contrast. Moreover, the removed standpoint permits the
subtle handling of difficult, often delicate subjects. By using echoes or
flipping the reader’s perspective, it becomes possible to reveal absurdities
while sparing sensibilities… And they call it fluff ;)
This being said, always remember that the more you
diverge from the primary reality, the harder it will be to debate concrete
notions and critique society. Sadly, this means that most imaginary worlds will
be parasites of our own, but how? Will your creation be linked, or completely
independent? What will be its mechanics?
You can choose the oldest trick in the book: the geography
or spatial angle (think Jules Vernes, Gulliver’s Travels, or the Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy), in which the distance traveled by the hero explains
differences and where comparison with the primary society is built in.
Or you can reverse the Science Fiction thing, make your
world a blast from the past, or something that feels like it could be our past (even if you set it in our future).
Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, along with our fascination for Arthurian romances, has
made this the conventional choice of High Fantasy. In these realities, traditional
and heroic values of days yore are often imbued with a nostalgic glow to
denounce the evils of our modern societies.
You can go Quantum, create a parallel dimension. This
sort of world will usually be linked to ours, be it by a rabbit hole (Alice’s Wonderland) or a wardrobe (C.S. Lewis’s Narnia), thus permitting comparisons. There
are exceptions, especially in realities only slightly different than ours, although
this means you cannot define it as a parallel dimension in the story itself.
You can do a Harry Potter and use a
pocket dimension existing within our own. Of course, you may find a wholly new
way – Bravo! – or you can mix everything up and create something in the lines
of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. You may want to explain your world, or not, or
just leave tantalizing clues.
At page thirty of Incompetent Gods, I realized I had created
a parallel dimension. I opted to explain it, for its genesis was directly
responsible for its society. My world split from ours two thousand years ago,
when the ancient pagan gods, sickened by the spread of atheism (and perhaps the
arrival of new competition), decided to rip the fabric of time and space, and
leave this reality for a new one. This time, they said, we will live amongst
the humans, so they will never stop believing. They didn’t realized that
knowledge is not faith… Forward two thousand years, a couple of centuries after
the end of an era marked by global warfare where gods had become the equivalent
of atomic bombs, and they are now safely ensconced in Gods Incorporated, a huge
multinational that regiments the relations between mortals and immortals.
Mine became an exercise in extrapolation (or
retrogression for some parameters – remember I was already on page thirty),
perhaps closer to Science Fiction than Fantasy: change a variable, and see
where it takes you. Divine beings exuding it like we expel carbon dioxide
explained the omnipresence of magic (while its unreliability dictated the need
for technology). The combined existence of pagan gods, by definition
promiscuous and weirdly shaped, and breaches in the space-time continuum that
permit teleportation (and resulting splicing accidents), justified the presence
of mythical creatures. And in a society where divine intervention is expected,
miracles and acts of gods became bought and paid for commodities.
Whatever your model of choice, whether you choose to
explain it or not, you will need to
know how your world works, what is possible and what isn’t, for the smallest inconsistencies
can shatter the illusion you have worked so hard to create.
References & suggestions for further reading
Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds. SF and the Human
Imagination.
Stephen King, On Writing.
Ann Swinfen, In Defense of Fantasy. A study of the genre
in English and American litterature since 1945.
J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf. Including the poem Mythopoeia.
