Karina Teaches Worldbuilding 201 – Lesson 3

Over this year, Karina is going to share some of her writing seminars on the blog, with the lessons and references for further study. We’ll be posting these once a month. There’s no assigned homework, but if you have questions, please ask them in the comments. Her first workshop is worldbuilding. This is Worldbuilding 201, Lesson 3.  Follow this link to Lesson 1 and Lesson 2. Here are the links to Worldbuilding 101 Lesson 1, Lesson 2, Lesson 3, Lesson 4, Lesson 5, Lesson 6, and Lesson 7.

Karina teaches monthly webinars as well. Please check out her current schedule, or if you’d like her to teach at your writing group or class, see what courses she can offer.

The best worldbuilding supports characters and stories, not the other way around. Otherwise, people revert to nonfiction, whether National Geographic or D&D manuals. So whatever your world is like, you need your people to be products of your world.

We’ve already seen some of this in previous lessons. In Lesson One, we saw that Team Leader Garsul was an alien with multiple stomachs which is probably a prey species rather than a predator species. In Lesson Two, we learned something about Rachel through how she saw her world. I’d like to give two more examples:

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea chest following behind him in a hand-barrow; tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred with black, broken nails; and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old-sea-song that he sang so often afterwards–

“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest–Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”

How could you NOT know we’re in a seedy dive near the docks where there be pirates, aarrrr?

When you read this one, ask what the world feels about its superheroes: Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman

Damsel crosses through the computer room from the roof deck. “Are you really watching that thing? God, look at my eighties hair.” But she doesn’t hang around. I wouldn’t either, knowing what was coming.

I feel like skipping the wedding spectacle, but Lily makes us watch every treacly second of it. It was practically a national holiday at the time, but watching it now feels painful, the way the two of them glare at each other. CoreFire was the best man, Galatea the maid of honor.

At least we got to fast-forward through a compilation of painful Saturday Night Live appearances–there was no way to make Galatea funny. The best part was John Belushi in a red leotard and plastic cape, expectorating mashed potatoes all over a gamely smiling CoreFire. It think he was supposed to be Doctor Impossible.

As you write, remember: You did not build this world for yourself or even for your readers. You built it for the characters that inhabit it. If you want to entice your readers to be a part of it as well, then you need to make sure your characters are truly products of their world, and that we see the world through their eyes.