Monday means Fantasy with Friends time! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about methods of worldbuilding:
Ursula K Le Guin has written about “consciously imitating” Tolkien and creating a wider landscape and history for her fantasy world by naming events or places she actually knew nothing about at the time she wrote them (as opposed to Tolkien, who was referencing events already decided in his unpublished work). What do you think of this strategy for creating “plausibility?” Do you think readers can tell when authors are referencing things that have no “real” definition? Can it come across as just making stuff up, or can it work to convince the reader the world is real?
I don’t think Le Guin and Tolkien’s methods are as far apart as they sound, because Tolkien did make things up at some point (he wasn’t writing real history, after all!), and sometimes when asked questions about aspects of the world, he hadn’t worked them out (or hadn’t worked them out fully yet). I think the difference is mostly in approach: Tolkien was deliberately setting out to write his own language and history, and ensuring that all fit together was part of the enjoyment for him. But Ursula Le Guin wasn’t a careless writer, and she didn’t generally write herself into corners with this kind of thing: she didn’t come up with something and later trip over it, or if she did, she wrote herself back out of it again.
That said, I know more about Tolkien’s approach than hers, to be honest, since I’ve studied Tolkien and read his collected letters, etc. I’ve read some of Le Guin’s essays, but by no means all, and I definitely haven’t gone spelunking in work unpublished by her in her lifetime. I can only speak to my experience as a reader, and generally she had guiding principles behind her worlds and then explored those. With her work, and I think in her essays reflecting on that, there’s a sense of her discovering stuff that in her mind was “already there”. Things happened in Earthsea in the back of her mind while she wasn’t watching, which tells me that she wasn’t just making things up to, say, write a story to fit an anthology. She had principles established so that when she did “visit” a certain aspect of her world, things unfolded naturally.
I don’t think all writers are as thorough as Tolkien or as skilled as Le Guin, for sure. I know that when I make something up when I’m writing, I have to put at least a bit of thought into what’s behind it in order to be sure it fits and that it won’t mess anything up later. Sometimes it’s worth it to include something that messes other things up later, though, because the mess is interesting and then editing fixes any continuity issues and smooths the rough edges.
Some writers definitely end up writing themselves into corners by realising in book three that they stated something in book one that no longer makes sense, or by forgetting details they made up previously. It can definitely cause problems like leaving the world-building feeling flat, because nothing leads anywhere, or everything’s just mentioned once in passing.
In the end, it comes down to author skill — and the skill of their editor — in tidying up those loose ends and making sure they’ve breathed enough life into the thing, and in making the reader trust them. I think the important thing is that you need to create a feeling that there’s stuff going on around the story, rather than that the only things which ever happen in your world are somehow all plot relevant.
