Weekly Update - 119

Taking this week off from regular posts to catch up doing some work on Volume 1 and also to spend some time doing some worldbuilding.

Comic this week?  No, for reasons above.

Drawing: Touching up pages for Volume 1, and starting work on Page 142.

Playing: V Rising and WoW.

Ramble:

I think just last week I rambled about how I didn't want to do any more 3-hour rambles...  So here's a five-hour ramble.  >.>

I feel like I need to do some worldbuilding this week.  Like I've said before, much of Kiva's story, or the parts of it I'm telling currently, were written a long time ago, and they just need to be drawn.  But nearly four years into the telling of this story I've grown as a person and I've changed my mind about a fair few things... and I've also forgotten a lot of stuff that I established early on that I want to review and revisit.  It's important to make sure the story I'm telling stays consistent with the world it's set in, even as I change around it.

A writer that I knew when I worked in the games industry once gave me a piece of advice I'll never forget. As he so eloquently put it: "Worldbuilding is masturbation."  I'm sure I've mentioned it before, and again, let me assure Patreon's Trust and Safety team that this will be a tame, and hopefully insightful post that fully aligns with Patreon's community guidelines.  Sorry guys, I really hope Patreon doesn't make you review every single post with a potentially problematic word in it.  It is, perhaps, specifically BECAUSE of the writer's use of crass language that I found his advice so memorable.  Similarly to how I remember the "work is like eating a big bowl of shit" analogy that one of our department directors once delivered to our exhausted and overworked team, but that is a very different story for a different day.

The point was basically this: worldbuilding is, and can be, self-indulgent and it can sometimes serve no productive purpose beyond self-gratification.  I'm sure many of you have seen it in tabletop gaming where you might be excited to participate in a new campaign, only to be told the GM is still working on building out the world.  For... months.  And then it becomes years... and the campaign ultimately never starts because the players all lose interest while the GM is still trying to decide on what color the flowers are outside the cobbler's house in a small village at the edge of the region that the players are unlikely to ever visit.

It's "fun" to come up with every detail about a living, breathing world.  And in many ways it's akin to playing by oneself.  It is a peaceful, solitary activity that does not involve any input from external sources.  You have total control over what happens in your world, and there's nothing stopping you from making the choices you want to make that govern that world.  We, as authors, want our worlds to be rich and full and to feel like they are lived in.  We are taught that the more fully fleshed out a world is, the better the story will be.  We often believe, quite wrongly, that the great stories of Tolkien and Sanderson and Herbert are complete, fully thought-through, free of gaps and holes, with every single detail hashed out by the author down to the finest minutia.  But like I said, we're wrong.  Tolkien's world, his whole universe, as detailed and rich as it seems, was a work-in-progress up until the moment of his death, with Tolkien himself retconning things constantly.  The reason these authors' worlds are so awe-inspiring is simply because the gaps left by the author are in places that allow the readers to fill them with their own imaginations, and it feels so natural that we don't even realize we're doing it.

I don't mean this to sound like an argument against worldbuilding in general.  Worldbuilding is important, just keep yourself aware that it can also be a trap.  A story must exist in a setting, but it's unproductive to work on granular details that are so far removed from the story that they are irrelevant.  Worldbuilding should be done in support of the stories told within it, not agnostic of them.  Worldbuilding can be like a fractal drawing.  The further you go down any given branch, the more questions you find that you will want answered.  And, indeed, if you look up any worldbuilding forms online you can be presented with thousands upon thousands of irrelevant questions.  It's a huge waste of time, and I would suggest avoiding those forms entirely.  It's okay to admit you don't know the answer to any given question.  You're the author, and it feels like you should know, and you should know there is AN answer, but it's okay to admit you might not know what it is.... yet.

So what can we do to temper our worldbuilding and make it more productive?  My first piece of advice is to keep it coarse.  Figure out the big things, and focus on the things that are critical to the story.  You can get granular if it's important to do so, like if your characters are going to be spending a lot of time at home, it makes sense for you to fill their house with details.  Those are what we care about, as readers (or players if you're GMing).  Seeing that there's a fork on the floor of the kitchen or a pot on the counter tells us something about this character.  It's not always clear what it tells us about them, but it tells us something different from a character that lives in an entirely spotless kitchen that practically sparkles and has everything put away.  Our imaginations will begin to fill in the rest.  But there is no reason to tear your hair out because you can't figure out what color the flowers are outside the cobbler's house in the remote village at the edge of the region that the characters in the story will never go to.  You could stop far, far earlier than that.  You can stop at the fact there's a village at the edge of that region. That's as far as you need to go. Even deciding that it has a cobbler in it might be one step too far.  If your story takes a turn (or again if you're GMing and your players end up heading that way,) knowing the village has a cobbler or that the cobbler's house has flowers outside of it is a detail you can always add in later.  Unless the cobbler is somehow an evil agent of the Demi-Lich that lives in his basement which is secretly your BBEG all along, whether that cobbler exists or not probably won't have much of an impact on your world or its overall story, so you should feel free to leave the details of that remote village at the edge of the region blank, for now.

Second, keep your worldbuilding character-focused.  Define your world around the characters you love and the stories you want to tell involving them.  If you write a scene with your character drinking coffee, we can all figure out that your world has coffee in it.  Where does the coffee come from?  How does it get there?  Who brews it?  Those are questions that you, the author might know, but those are also questions that we, the readers will probably not be asking, and probably don't need to be told unless it later becomes relevant to the story.  IE. if there's a sudden coffee shortage, throwing the entire world into absolute chaos because without coffee everyone turns into miserable caffeine-deprived zombies!

Long ramble is long.  One last thought though:  "Worldbuilding" is a lie.  Build a setting.  Not a world, not a set, but a setting.  You as the author should know more about your setting than your characters or your readers, but only a little bit more.  Like 20% more.  To help keep your world consistent and so that it makes sense in accordance with its own rules, you should build your setting to be an interconnected, fully fleshed-out backdrop for your story.  Don't build a world.  A world is a massive undertaking.  You aren't superhuman.
You cannot conceivably build an entire world, or an entire universe, for that matter, with every detail about each creature and plant on each of those planets and each ecosystem for every biome and also how they are affected by weather patterns that are governed by atmospheric pressure changes brought on by migrating butterflies.  Are you going to define your entire ecology, from the mammals to the fungi to the bacteria cultures?  Don't waste your time building inconsequential details.  Let your readers fill in the gaps, let them use their imaginations and make assumptions.  They will anyway, so let them!  And let them do it in the spaces that you, yourself, have yet to define.  Dictate the things that are important to your story and let your readers fill in the rest. Remember though that you are building a setting, not a set.  A set is a stage with a bunch of cheap plywood props that fall over the second they are mishandled.  The props are wheeled out onto stage, then pushed back behind the curtain until they are needed again.  It doesn't take more than a second glance to see how fake a set looks.  Don't build a set.  Build a setting.  Build a location, a real place.  A space in your world where your story takes place.  Transport your readers to a location, one that lives and breathes and moves and has flora and fauna and weather and enough details to convince us that it's real, but when you start to travel far outside the boundaries of your story, or if you start to look really close at the underside of those carefully crafted leaves, there's still plenty of room for questions.