If you’re writing short fiction, how much of your world do you even need to figure out? Should you have it all written out? Can you just wing it? This week on the podcast, we discuss how much of a world to build for a short story (and how). We provide some guiding questions that you can use to build the world of your novel or short story. We explore different narrative structures, DND worlds without police, and the reader’s experience. 

Homework: 

Take a big world-building concept and pick one or two iconic elements that bring it to life. Take one and make it a key part of a short scene.

Get ready for NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month! For the month of November, writers all over the world are trying to complete a novel, or write 50,000 words. In honor of NaNoWriMo, all of our November episodes are going to focus on writing a novel or big project.

You don’t need to write a whole book, though! We encourage you to work on a smaller project, or simply commit to writing every day.

Thing of the Week:

The Quiet Year (a map-drawing tabletop role-playing game)

Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: How much world can you put in a short story? How much world do you need to write a short story? Take one or two aspects of a concept, dive into those, and handwave the rest? Throw in a few small details to make the world feel bigger? Do enough worldbuilding to make sure the framework for the story exists. Keep a tracking document, with notes on each worldbuilding element, and review after drafting. Look for places that aren’t loadbearing, where a specific detail can imply a larger world without opening questions. How much exposition does it take to explain the element? Too much, it is distorting. Short fiction readers expect you to leave things out on purpose. Every worldbuilding element creates stakes for someone. Everyone has their own understanding of the world. Emphasis, something that is important to the character, or decorative flourish, adding tone for the reader? Short fiction relies a lot on the reader filling in implications and patterns. 

[Season 18, Episode 43]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Worldbuilding In Miniature.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you’re in a hurry.

[Howard] And we’re really tiny.

[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I’m DongWon.

[Erin] I’m Erin.

[Howard] I’m Howard.

[Erin] I love short fiction, as we’ve already discussed, so I’m going to talk about worldbuilding in a short fiction world. I’m really excited to kind of… This is one where I don’t have a great theory, I just kind of want to think about it out loud, like, how much world can you put in a short story, and how much world do you need in order to write a short story? I will say that when I start writing short fiction, I often just have a one liner. I usually have, like a… Sour Milk Girls is the best example of this, even though it came out of a longer idea, it was what if memory were a commodity? Then, my second question is always who is suffering? Because I am me. Then, usually that’s where I place my main character in that. But there is a lot of stuff that’s not explained in any of the short stories that we read. There is a lot of things you don’t know about the broader world. What I think short stories give you the opportunity to do is to take one or 2 aspects of a concept that have emotional resonance for your characters, dive into those, and then handwave the rest. If you can throw in a few small details that make the world feel big on top of that, all the more so the better. But I’m curious what y’all think about, like, when you’re reading or writing, what is the difference between what you see in a world in miniature versus big?

[Howard] For my own part, the one idea… This is a cool thing, I want to tell a story about it. How much worldbuilding do I need to do? I need to do enough extrapolative worldbuilding… Where’d this come from, where is this going… That I can be certain that the framework for the story I’ve created actually exists. If your… What if memory was a commodity story, if there was something about the way commodification of memory went that made orphanages not exist, then suddenly I’ve unplugged the story and I would have to go back and rework it. So that’s really the extent of it. I just make sure, hey, is this a cool idea? Yes. Does this cool idea negate the way in which I want to explore the cool idea? If the answer is no, I’m off to the races.

[Erin] I often think about… Thinking about did I break it midway through…

[Sputters]

[Erin] So I have a theory, like, that every writer does something subconsciously really well. You’ll have writers will say like this character came and spoke to me at night and, like, told me their story. That never happens for me, but I feel like those people just do character on a subconscious level. For me, a lot of worldbuilding happens on a subconscious level. Where I’ll toss a detail into a sentence, I’ll be like, “And then they went to…” I don’t know, whatever thing, random thing I’ve decided to put in their. Later I’ll be like that doesn’t necessarily make sense. Like, in a world where memory is a commodity, they’re probably not in space. So I probably should take the space elevator reference out, for example. It didn’t happen, but it could have. So one of the things I actually do is while I’m writing, I will sometimes keep a document open, a PowerPoint a lot of the time, weirdly, and actually put anything that I put in that’s a worldbuilding element into a one particular slide on the PowerPoint. So that at the end of drafting, I can look can be like, do these work?

[Laughter]

[Erin] Actually seem like they belong in the same world, yes or no?

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Oh, interesting.

[Erin] If one is an odd item out, I need to go back and either figure out a way to make it make sense in my head, or excise that and it needs to go into a different story.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that’s really interesting. That’s a really neat, measurable tool.

[DongWon] Cool trick, yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So I… For me it’s… I will also just drop in random details, and I find that when I’m specific about a thing, that it implies this whole larger world. So I look for places where I can be specific about something that’s not necessarily loadbearing, that implies a larger world but doesn’t open questions. That’s where you get into the tricky thing with worldbuilding, is if you drop in something that… And then it opens a question about the story. Like, well, why didn’t they just ride the Eagles? Then… That’s where you’re creating a problem for yourself with the worldbuilding. So one of the tricks that I use is how much exposition do I have to use to explain the thing that I’ve just dropped in. If it’s more than 2 sentences, then it’s a worldbuilding detail that is distorting the story. Because I’m like, that’s too much. The other piece for me is the difference in expectations between audiences. So, novel readers I’ve found assume that if you don’t put something in, it’s because you forgot about it, because there reading for that immersion. Short story readers are so used to putting the story together from pieces of implication that they work on the idea that if it’s not there, you left it out on purpose. So you can say, “Well, I used a Teraport thing.” If you don’t mention how that works, they’re like Oh. Well, it’s not important to the story, how it works.”

[Erin] I also love one of the things I think you can do for short fiction audiences is use the way that pattern… That minds create patterns to create some of that broadness.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] Like, if you say this is the 3rd God of death, okay, well, that’s interesting. There are obviously 2 previous gods of death. What happened to them? I don’t know. Maybe I don’t need to say. But it makes me think about audience expectation as when I started writing tabletop, you can’t do that.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] So if you put a detail into a scene, you have to expect players will want to go talk to the first 2 gods of death or know what happened to them, or if you create something that’s like that came from the caves of pleasure, like someone’s going to want to go there. In fact, when I first started getting feedback back from editors, it was like, “Stop putting in the details that you do not have the word count to explain.” Because I was so used to that short fiction thing that you do where you kind of drop the things out there and let people create it. But it’s interesting to think that in novels, people will expect you to kind of build the world out that far.

[DongWon] Yep. As a kind of a theory about why it happens this way, and this is sort of informed by my perspective from an editorial side more than a writer side. Right? That is to flip the iceberg metaphor on its head. The iceberg metaphor being that, like, does all this worldbuilding we only see the top 10%, but the rest of it’s below water. You as the writer need to have some idea what that is. Instead, the way I think about worldbuilding, and one thing that’s also important, is to realize that worldbuilding isn’t a science fiction and fantasy thing. It’s not a genre thing. It is a fiction thing. Any story you’re writing, you are including worldbuilding. Whether you are describing a suburban cul-de-sac or a war zone or a high fantasy city, all of that is worldbuilding.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Because every time you introduce a world detail, it is… You’re introducing a rule for that world. So people think about worldbuilding as like a particular type of technology or a particular location, but for me it’s a way to tell your readers, your audience, what’s important. Right? Because if you are introducing a university, then you’re saying a certain type of hierarchy is important. If you are introducing a magic system, you’re saying that logic is important. Right? So what matters to your characters are the rules of the world around them. So if you’re saying there are police, then obeying the law is important in a certain way. Right? That creates character stakes. Right? The problem you run into in the RPG is you don’t have control over the characters. So every time you introduce a worldbuilding element, you’re introducing stakes for somebody. One of those stakes is I worship the God of death. This is the 3rd one, what the hell happened to the first 2? I gotta know. Right? So that becomes an impulse for that character to explore, because suddenly you’ve established stakes for them by putting something into the world. Right? So it is very useful, the iceberg metaphor is very, very useful, but sometimes if you’re stuck about what do I actually need to include in this story, you can take a step back and say, “Okay. Who’s my character, what matters to them, what rules do I need to define so that they can make the choices they need to make?” Then be hyper specific about which aspects of the world are you showing us to establish the emotional stakes for that character.

[Howard] See, we had James Sutter on the podcast years ago. He’s one of the lead creatives at Paizo. His position, for 3rd God of death, would have been completely opposite of what your editors were telling you, Erin, in that he would encourage writers to say, “Oh, and this character is a monk from the Singing Cliffs.” What are we doing with the Singing Cliffs? I don’t know, I’m just putting some things together so that you feel like the world is bigger than just where you are. Are the players going to want to go to the Singing Cliffs? Maybe they are. You, as a writer, is a game master, need to be prepared to design the Singing Cliffs. Within a franchise, though, I think this is where your editors come in, James Sutter was in a position where he could drop Singing Cliffs and the whatevers all day long because he knew, at some point, he’s going to get to go create those. Your editors are like, “Please stop dropping new locations in our world. We don’t have that budget.”

[Erin] Yeah. We are going to talk more about this and about the iceberg theory when we return from the break.

[Erin] Often times when we think about tabletop role-playing games, you think big D&D playing with a bunch of friends. But there are a lot of smaller games that can actually help you build worlds, and think about your writing in really interesting ways. One of them is The Quiet Year from Buried without Ceremony. What it is is a game where you’re mapping out a new community on a tabletop using playing cards that you probably have in your own home to answer really interesting questions about that community. Like, what are the omens? What’s the largest body of water? What are people afraid of? What do they run towards? I love using this when I’m trying to think about building a new world, to make me ask interesting questions that can help to broaden my story and make it that much more interesting. So, definitely check out The Quiet Year by Buried without Ceremony.

[Erin] So, I was very excited when you talked about the iceberg theory…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Because I love thinking about it. One of the things that I think came up earlier was the idea about, like, a that character and worldbuilding intersect. Which I think is even more important in short fiction than it is in longer fiction, because it’s so much more character focused a lot of the time. I was thinking, like, and iceberg has a very different meaning to the captain of the Titanic as it does for somebody who is a coldwater swimmer, or somebody who is an iceberg diver. That’s not a thing, but let’s say it is. Where…

[Howard] A climatologist.

[Erin] A climatologist. Thank you. I think that one of the things I like to think about with worldbuilding is every single person does not understand the world in the same way. I think that sometimes a mistake or something that I see that like gets me under my skin is when it seems like everyone has the same knowledge of the world within a world. You know what I mean? It’s like everyone knows about the battle of X. Y’all, we barely know our own history…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Going back like a year. You know what I mean? It’s like things that people said everyone would remember, like, I love looking at all the crimes of the century that have existed. Like, I remember in Ragtime The Musical, they talk about the crime of the century being, like, Evelyn Nesbitt’s husband murdered her somebody… I don’t remember, because no one cares. So, I think thinking about like what do your characters know of what the world is and how it works is very different… Even between the 3 of us, we would probably explain something differently about the way of the world. That gives you a lot of ways to think about worldbuilding, to think about power in worldbuilding, to think about what are the ways in which a world matters. Because if you make the world matter to the character…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Then you make the world matter to the reader.

[Mary Robinette] So this… That idea of what matters to the character and matters to the reader gets back, for me, to how to control that in short story form. As you all have been talking, I feel like I’ve had a little bit of an epiphany. Let me just try this out and see how this fits for you all. So I was thinking that one of the ways that I will use worldbuilding’s for emphasis. That, using the puppetry metaphor of focus, that the longer you linger on something, the more important it is to the character. That long gaze. So, I think that worldbuilding comes in, like, when we’re dropping these specific details for the reader. That there’s kind of 2 modes with a spectrum in between of the decorative flourish and the emphasis. That the thing that you’re trying to put emphasis on, with the emphasis, these are the things the character interacts with. These are the things we’re going to have to know what the ripple effects are. But then you also have the decorative flourishes which exist to create tone for the reader. So when you’re looking at, like, your PowerPoint slide of the things, it’s like do these fit in the world, it’s not just do these fit into the system, it’s like do these support the tone I’m trying to create for the reader in the short form and is my character interacting with them in a way that moves the story forward. Like, those are the pieces that I think that were looking at, and everything else we can kind of… Like, if it’s not doing one of those 2 things, does it belong in the story? How does that fit?

[Erin] I love this, and I especially love it because it lets you know when your worldbuilding is not going wrong, but where you may be creating issues for yourself in making your story too big. If your decorative flourish feels like something that should have impact on the character, but it’s not…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] You treated as a flourish, but it actually… Like, why would they not care… Why would this not be the thing that matters to them? That’s when it feels like, okay, now I want to go explore that. So part of it is figuring out what should be just a flourish.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] What is just an extra that helps to create tone, and what is it that actually hits the core of your story, which means you have to understand what’s the core and the heart of the story and the characters.

[DongWon] Well, some of the examples you brought up are things that you wanted to be flourishes, but end up being loadbearing in a certain way. Like, putting a space elevator in your story, your like, “Oh, wait. This was supposed to be a flourish, but if I introduce that, it complicates things too much.” Right? So I think finding that balance… I do love this framework… Is such the trick of the whole thing.

[Howard] The decorative flourish of this character is a monk from the Singing Cliffs, that’s fine, that’s decorative. But if we then, a few paragraphs later, talk about this pattern of stucco as being something that is commonly found among the tribes of the Singing Cliffs, suddenly the reader sits forward and says, “Oo. Singing Cliffs. That must be important.” If you didn’t want it to be important, don’t use that flourish in 2 places.

[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Because you’ve now…

[DongWon] That lingering gaze.

[Howard] Now created a clue that you didn’t want to create.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I also think it’s good to look at your flourishes. This gets back to what you said about if you put police in, then that’s a specific society. I think sometimes the flourishes that we go to are the flourishes we know from our own lives.

[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So, when we’re trying to create like a quick obstacle, we might have like a garden, for example, show up. Because guards prevent you from getting places. But having a guard says something about the system of justice, about a system of power. So even though that may not be what your story’s doing, and you may choose in the end not to care about it… One of the things that I also think is fun to do is look at what is the broader world that my flourishes are implying, and is that the world that I want my story to live in.

[DongWon] That’s such an interesting one, because, as I mentioned, I like to run a lot of RPG’s, I do a lot of campaigns and campaign settings. I almost always do homebrew. The challenge I have set myself multiple times and I have failed at every time is to build a city or world that doesn’t have police. Right? This is a of me pushing, and then trying to advance my anti-[garbled incarcerate] thinking, how do I imagine a world that doesn’t have those kinds of systems of power? Right? It is very hard. Right? It’s very hard to envision that world from where we stand right now, and it is so interesting of a for me to explore this idea, and interesting to me in watching the ways in which I failed to do that. Because I do have an instinctive like, well, the characters did something chaotic, we need some police to chase them around now. Or they killed somebody, what do we do about this? Like, what systems of justice can we put into play here? It becomes very difficult. But I do like this idea that you can use worldbuilding as a critical tool in your set. Right? I think we think of it so much as a thing just for the characters to bounce off of, but it can be so generative on its own. I think that’s part of why I love RPG’s in general, is because the main tool I have as a GM often is those worldbuilding rules to influence my characters and guide them and direct them. So the way that works into fiction is giving your characters those stakes and those things to bounce off of.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Yeah. I will say that I… One of the things that I’m really proud of in my work on Journeys through the Radiant Citadel is that the setting I created, God’s Breath, has no police.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And also has no centralized power. Which is very difficult. Because it is hard. It’s like at the end of a story…

[DongWon] A fun challenge.

[Erin] You know what I mean? Like, you… Like, who is then telling you to go do things?

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] Who is rewarding you when you come back with stuff? Also, like, how do you make big changes, because I think something that we often see in fiction, which doesn’t work in the real world, but feels good in fiction, is the idea that, like, you change the king, you change the world.

[DongWon] Yup.

[Erin] You change the corporate, like who’s running the evil corporation, the evil corporation fixes itself. So, like, there’s the idea that you want to take an evil and like personify it. So figuring out how to make things a little more about the system and less about the person…

[DongWon] It highlights how much of our fantasy stories rely on restoration fantasy. Right? So if you want to tell a fantasy story in a high fantasy setting, so much of what we’re looking for is, how do we depose the evil king and restore the rightful heir? Right? When we take out some elements like policing, like jails, like centralized power, then suddenly you’re in a much more complicated world. That can be really fun. Also, my players were like, “We don’t know what to do with this world half the time.” It’s interesting to watch the ways it failed in that way. Because without some of those narrative structures, your audience won’t always know how to interact with the world that you’ve created.

[Mary Robinette] Right. When you’re dealing with short fiction, because you’re relying so much on the implication and the pattern seeking that the reader comes with, you have to be aware of what those societal things are because the reader is going to apply that lens. If you aren’t thinking about it ahead of time, with your world building, even if it’s not fully on the page, the reader will impose stuff for you.

[DongWon] Exactly. Everyone comes to the story with their own baggage and their own understanding. Being aware of that and conscious of that is part of your challenge as the creator.

[Erin] Yeah, I will talk really quickly, I know we’re getting towards the end of time, but one of the things that was a challenge for me, when I wrote Snake Season, is that it’s very much in one person’s head…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] She was very isolated from the world. Part of the reason that the Conjureman exists as a character, and that also the women that visit, like, exist… You don’t see them, but they are like a function in the story, is to give you a sense of what the world thinks it is around her. Because otherwise, she’s just… You don’t… You can’t tell what’s real and what’s not real, what’s going on, but by having these characters who represent like the world trying to exert itself on the character, it gives a to give some more meat to what’s going on and to tell what is a flourish and what is actually like a loadbearing wall of this particular narrative.

[DongWon] Exactly. Yeah. We had such a fun conversation over breakfast, Mary Robinette and I, over what actually happened in the story, like what’s real.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I love that it’s slippery. Right? I love the implication that there is reality somewhere here, but your world building elements make it kind of slippery in a way that’s really fun and… I don’t know. It makes it energetic in that way.

[Howard] Well, bear in mind that the reader experience here is… This was not a story about what kind of world is this. This is a story about what is this person going to do. What has this person done. I mean, the reader can go back and ask those larger questions, but the story wasn’t created to answer them. The story was created just to… I say just to. The story was created just to mess…

[Laughter]

[Just to mess with you.]

[Laughter]

[Howard] Mess with you.

[DongWon] Because you are the antagonist, going back to a previous episode.

[Mary Robinette] But I think what it does is that… That because it’s slippery, because to refer to the magic system, the magic system episode, because it is not well defined, it creates more space for the reader to bring themselves into it. I think that’s one of the real powers of short fiction, is that all of that implication stuff means that the reader… Each reader’s reaction is going to be different, because they are putting more of themselves into the story, I think, in a lot of ways.

[Howard] There’s more room for the reader to do that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I think we are about at the end of things. But before we go to the homework, just a heads up that we are going to be taking a quick pause in this deep dive. Because National Novel Writing Month is upon us. As much as I love short fiction, I also love Nanowrimo as a way to stretch and see what I can do in a different form. We’re going to invite you all to come with us and think about the ways we can all sit down and write a novel or novel shaped object together. With that, the homework.

[Howard] Right here. Take a big worldbuilding concept, and when I say concept, I mean interrelated, the whole big worldbuilding thing, and pick one or 2 iconic elements that bring it to life for you. Then take one of those and make it a key piece of one short scene.

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.

[DongWon] Please rate and review us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts or your podcast platform of choice. Your ratings help other writers discover us for the first time.