7 deadly sins of worldbuilding

8/19/2019 7 Deadly Sins of Worldbuilding

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How do they eat? What do they eat? Who takes away the garbage? Who deals

with their bodily wastes? How do they get around? What do the majority of

people do to survive? You're not just constructing a society, you're creating

an economy. People don't oppress each other for fun — usually, systems of

hierarchy and oppression have an economic component to them. Maybe you

need a lot of peasants to grow labor-intensive crops, or maybe you need lots

of cannon fodder in your space war. Maybe your only source of protein is a weird fungus that needs to be tended by specially trained people. Maybe

everybody's eating algae. In any case, there's nothing worse than a fictional

world where there are elaborate social structures, which seem completely

separated from the realities of food, shelter and clothing.

2. Not explaining why events are happening now.

Chances are your story revolves around all heck breaking loose in your

fictional world. (Or your fictionalized version of the "real" world.) One major

worldbuilding flaw is not explaining why heck is breaking loose now, as

opposed to 20 years ago or 20 years from now. Why is the dark elf army

showing up now? Was there something preventing them from showing up,

which has been removed? Will it be too late if they wait another year or two?

Often, if your plot is swinging into motion for reasons that feel purely

arbitrary, that's actually a failure of worldbuilding. You haven't fullyaccounted for the things that kept your villain in check, and probably also for

the factors that keep other political actors in your society in check as well.

And that's a larger issue — every society has checks and balances. Even an

absolute monarchy has invisible lines the monarch can't cross. Sometimes

you can't figure out how these checks and balances worked in a particular

era, without reaching beyond the official history as sanctioned by the people

in charge.

Deadly Sins of Worldbuilding http://io9.com/7-deadly-sins-of-worldbuilding-99881...

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On a related note, if you're drawing on real-life history, for

your fantasy world or your future history, don't just read

works by historians from the dominant culture, or worksfocusing on the ruling class. Historians have done amazing

work on discovering what ordinary people and marginalized

groups were doing during a lot of eras, and there's plenty of

resources on what was going on in, say, the Middle Ages

outside of Western Europe. To the extent that you rely on

actual history in your world-building, you should reach

beyond the Kings and nobles of a few Western countries.Image by Frederic St-Arnaud/CG Society.

3) Creating fictional versions of real-life human ethnicgroups, that never go beyond one dimension

This is a huge problem that tons of creators seem to struggle

with. But as a rule of thumb, if you want to have Belgians in

your novel, you're going to have to try and create an accurate

view of Belgian society. If you decide that instead of Belgians,

you're going to have an alien species called the Bzlgizns —

who are basically Belgians except they've got antlers — youstill have to try and make them well-rounded and as nuanced

as possible. Ditto if you're creating a secondary world where

there happens to be a land of magical creatures called The

Belge, who are still basically Belgians. Really, you should

make sure that any cultural or ethnic group you create has

multiple dimensions and a sense that its members have their

own subjectivity, and a believable culture. Whether it's the

Gay marriage in the year 100 ADGay marriage sounds like an ultra-contemporary

idea. But almost twenty years ago, a Catholic…


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culture that your main characters come

from, or a culture that they see as the

"other." But it's also a really good rule of

thumb that the more your fictional group

resembles real-life Belgians, the more you

ought to worry about being true to life.

Changing "Belgians" to "Bzlgizns" doesn’tactually let you off the hook for presenting a

true-to-life portrait of people from Belgium.

4) Creating monolithic social, political,cultural and religious groups.

Everybody in a particular ethnic group

agrees about everything. Every member of

the ruling class, or the working class, agrees

about everything. Every citizen of aparticular nation holds exactly the same set

of opinions. There is one version of history

that absolutely everybody agrees on. Every

member of a religion interprets the tenets of

that religion in exactly the same way. That

sounds plausible, right? Maybe if you've

never been around actual humans. In reallife, if you get three members of a particular

in-group together, you'll probably hear four

different opinions on most of the group's

major concerns. Asserting that all Christians

agree on all matters of doctrine is probably a

good way to get laughed out of the room. So

when you imagine the ruling class of your


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world, it's safe to assume

that no two members of it

will agree on much — and

when you retell your

fictional history, remember

that nobody's likely to agree

on what actually happened.Image by MacRebisz/Deviant

Art.

5) Inventing a history that istotally logical

In an imaginary world, the

strongest side always winsand the people who are in

charge are always the

descendants of the people

who were in charge 100

years ago. But real life isn't

like that — history is full of

odd quirks andhappenstances, and

powerful people often make

huge miscalculations that

wind up costing them dearly.

Just think about weird

happenstances like Ireland

being divided in half. Or

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Korea. Or

Germany,

for nearly

five decades.

Why is

WashingtonDC

the capitalof the

United

States

instead of

Philadelphia?

Why did the

Portuguesehave their

own colony

in India

until 1961?

History is

weird. And

things thatseem

inevitable in

retrospect

usually

seemed

anything but

at the time.So a totally

logical

history will

never pass

the "smell"

test. And

speaking of


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7 deadly sins of worldbuilding

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