Your Hosts: Howard, Mary Robinette, Dan, and DongWon
We invited attendees at WXR 2018 to ask us some general worldbuilding questions. Here’s what they asked:
What cultural stuff do you need to know during the writing process?
How do you treat overlaps between real-world religions and fictional religions when the fictional religions are part of the story’s fundamental conflict?
How much worldbuilding do you have figured out before you start your first draft, and how much do you discover on the fly?
What’s the point in a book beyond which you shouldn’t introduce big worldbuilding elements?
How do you ensure that the world comes through as a character of its own?
How much change to terminology is too much?
Credits: This episode was recorded live by Bert Grimm, and mastered by Alex Jackson
You had questions about heroes, villains, and main characters. We have answers! Here are the questions:
How do you make planned power increases not seem like an ass-pull¹?
What do you do when your villain is more interesting/engaging than your hero?
How do you know when a character is unnecessary and needs to be removed from the story, or killed off in the story?
What tricks do you use when you want the reader to mistakenly believe a character is a hero, rather than a villain?
Which is more fun for you: creating a villain, or creating a hero?
How many side characters can you reasonably juggle in a novel?
What are the drawbacks to making your villain a POV character?
If your villain doesn’t show up until late in the story, how do you make their eventual appearance seem justified?
How do you get readers to like a character who is a jerk?
Liner Footnotes ¹ We hadn’t seen “ass-pull,” the a nouning² of the idiom “pull it out of your ass³” as a noun before. ² Bill Watterson gave us the verb form of the word “noun” indirectly in the final panel of this strip. ³ For those unfamiliar with the extraction-from-orifice idiom, it means “make it up on the spot,” with a negative connotation, suggesting that the reader can TELL that this was invented in a hurry.
Find another writer. You each write a quick outline for a story, print it, then cut your outline into strips. Now, trade piles of strips. Your missions? Re-assemble the other writer’s outline.
