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What Details about the World are Important to Include.....
Dresdenus Prime:
Hi everyone! I need some advice. I’m working on my current story, something that’s really taking off, and I want to be sure I cover all the basics that a reader would be looking for.
Let’s say that an alien spaceship crashed on our planet, housing hundreds of thousands of aliens. They didn’t plan on coming here, at least we don’t think they did, but now that they’re here, they want to live as we do, so they start to try and invade and take over our territories, but we fight back, and before you know it we’re at war.
Fast forward a year later, and there is still war, we hate each other, but a lot of cities have calmed down and accepted that no one is going anywhere.
(that’s not the actual plot, just something I threw together to reflect it and get across the point im trying to make)
Okay now my question is, what kinds of things do I need to be detailing in my book concerning the way the world is now? Things like economy, politics, religion. What are the important aspects of our everyday lives that will need to be explained by my main character in the book as to how they turned out after the world went to hell and back?
I hope I worded this correctly, if not, I blame my dependency on afternoon coffee (I haven’t had it yet)
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
My immediate reaction is "everything", but I can see that that's not helpful.
I'd say that you'll get a most convincing world if you work out as much as possible, but that does not mean putting it all in; work it all out and put in what fits scene by scene as you tell the story, I'd say. You can get away with a certain amount of explaining things if you have characters to whom that makes sense in context (which is why so many SF/Fantasy novels are about either kids or strangers in new places), but that is easy to overdo; on the other hand, you can get a lot in by implication and trusting your readers not to be idiots.
In some ways, if you're writing relatively near future, you have the big benefit of being able to lean on how the world is now and anything that hasn't changed. On the other hand, that does open you to the possibility of making more mistakes about real-world things.
Dresdenus Prime:
--- Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on July 31, 2012, 06:38:18 PM ---In some ways, if you're writing relatively near future, you have the big benefit of being able to lean on how the world is now and anything that hasn't changed. On the other hand, that does open you to the possibility of making more mistakes about real-world things.
--- End quote ---
It's sort of this. The big event prior to my book takes place pretty much a month or two from now, and the book itself will pick up a year later. So events will be similar, but at the same time I feel like I need to shift them to adapt to the "war" that's ravaged throughout most of the world. So in one year, would the world have agreed to make one solidified dollar/euro/whatever, will each nation still have an individual leader, or will there still be multiple. I know I need to touch on almost everything, but while I'm writing I want to make sure I understand things which are most important. Obviously economy would be a big one. Human lives will be lost, cities will be ravaged or destroyed, stuff like that. So then I feel like government would be the second thing I should focus on. I guess I'm just unsure of how much change can take place over the course of one year, and how much of that change I need my character, who as of now will be around 17 and in high school, to communicate about to the reader
I want to make sure I have a good skeletal structure for some of these things as I'm writing. I appreciate the advice.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Dresdenus Prime on July 31, 2012, 07:17:38 PM --- So in one year, would the world have agreed to make one solidified dollar/euro/whatever, will each nation still have an individual leader, or will there still be multiple.
--- End quote ---
I'd very much doubt a year would be enough for a global unified currency, whatever the scale of disaster, or to drastically alter the political landscape of more than a handful of nations - unless the aliens have for some reason very specifically targeted particular established political interests, and it would take a lot of work to make me believe in aliens showing up on that time scale and getting both the understanding of human politics and the motivation to hack human power structures rather than smashing them. (I think you'd also need a bit more of the alien psychology worked out with regard to precisely how they see territory and ownership and so forth; it would break my suspension of disbelief for them to be exactly like humans in this regard, and the interesting areas would be where they have fundamental conceptual differences.)
--- Quote ---I guess I'm just unsure of how much change can take place over the course of one year, and how much of that change I need my character, who as of now will be around 17 and in high school, to communicate about to the reader
--- End quote ---
I think the fundamental question there is, what's your character like ? And the underlying fundamental point; description is character.
On one hand, I can imagine doing this from the POV of a geeky kid who is fascinated by the aliens and who is very much focused on what we know about them - quite possibly to an extent that surrounding people find suspicious and that has to be hidden. Or from the POV of someone who very closely identified with their home and community, who has felt that be broken, and who is very aware of all the ways things are different now and very focused on the details. (It would be hard not to make that a bit too angsty for my tastes, I think.) Or from the POV of a jock who doesn't really care too much care about any of that stuff so long as there's getting to blow aliens up, and who maybe still thinks of that too much in terms of having played Halo or Mass Effect or whatever seventeen-year-olds play these days (I am 39 and I play Civ, so no research help there) which would mean having to get the information across to the reader despite the viewpoint rather than because of it. (If I were doing that - which I almost certainly wouldn't, jock is not a mindset I grok - I'd be very tempted to include background details in briefing notes as a chapter-header sort of thing, and have the jock not pay adequate attention to them and get in trouble thereby.)
Also, if the story is first-person, you have the consideration of who the character is writing it for in the fictional universe, and what the character expects that reader to know. If the character is writing for a time capsule that's going to be shoved into the ruins in the hope humanity will recover in years to come, that might be reason to explain rather a lot, for example.
(One of the nicer things about the SF mystery I am currently working on is having a first-person security-professional protagonist who every now and then stops to say "I can't actually explain how this bit works, that's still classified." I figure that would be obnoxious if anything plot-important relied on it, but it's helping me be clear on what sorts of information she can talk about and what her attitude to security is, world-building and character development both - and she very much assumes her in-universe reader has seen the in-universe equivalent of Die Hard and Lethal Weapon but has no experience with real security work.)
superpsycho:
You only include those details that are important to telling the story, nothing else is important. Why would the details of currency be important? Who cares if it's called a franc, yen or dollar. What matters is the quality of characters and storyline. Don't try and share some wider vision you have about the concept, since all it will do is distract from the story.
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