Awkward questions elevate world building
You don’t care about originality.
“If the giant eagles were there, why didn’t they just fly the ring into Mordor in the first place?”
“Uhm, well… uh… they wanted to remain neutral! Yes, that’s why. They weren’t there to bear burdens. They wanted to remain neutral, in the face of an omni-industrialist that would have posed a direct threat to them had the war of the ring gone the other way.”
… Yeah, I’m not buying it.
A lot of fiction writers get stuck on making their stories and settings ‘original’. But we already know that nothing is truly original. According to Christopher Booker, we have seven archetypal story frameworks. There are, realistically, a similarly limited number of basic character archetypes, and the same probably applies to setting. Every story is told in relation to its context, and every narrative is built on the layers of prior narratives. Hence the expression ‘good artists copy, great artists steal.’ Which isn’t an excuse to plagiarise, it’s an exhortation to integrate.
What people are really saying when they express a desire to create something original is that what they have right now isn’t theirs. It doesn’t have their stamp on it.
You know a novel is written by Kazuo Ishiguro, because before you get to the present day, you are going on a thorough detour through their entire life story. You know a painting is by Zdzisław Beksiński because you can’t pronounce the author’s name for the life of you, but you are thoroughly unnerved by what you see. You know a game designed by Hidetaka Miyazaki because it has at least one poisoned swamp.
These creators have put their stamp on their work in a way that only they can. If I wrote a book with an emphasis on memory, nobody would think it was written by Ishiguro. Not just because it wouldn’t be written as well, but because I would write that book in a fundamentally different way, drawing on different influences and experiences. If I tried to paint a surrealist horror scene, nobody would have trouble distinguishing between my work and Beksiński’s; not just because I can’t paint full stop, let alone as well as Beksiński. Even if I could, the same thing applies: I’d be bringing a totally different set of experiences and perspectives to the creative process, and it would influence the output, no matter how closely I tried to keep to his style. I could create a game that was nothing but a toxic poison swamp of miserable death, and it still wouldn’t be mistaken for a Miyazaki swamp-o-doom; not just because I can’t code, but because whatever is driving Miyazaki’s obsession with toxic swamps is native to Miyazaki alone.
The same goes for creating settings. Putting your stamp on your work entails a whole lot more going on behind the scenes that is privy to you and you alone than anybody will realise. From your research to your emotional state, everything will find its way into the work. The devil is in the details. But how do you get at those details?
You could spend months and years creating an anthropological-style record of the mineral content of the tea cups in your setting from one decade to the next. I’m sure it’d be very detailed, but it still wouldn’t have your stamp on it. That’s because the details that matter aren’t just an exhaustive list of minutiae. Part of working out those details is just a matter of asking the right questions.
So, what kind of questions should you be asking?
Author fallibility
Arda is probably the worst example I could possibly use to illustrate today’s subject, given how well put together and well-thought-out Tolkien’s setting is. On the other hand, it highlights the importance of thinking hard about your setting and, more importantly, not ignoring the awkward questions.
Before I get crusaded by a bunch of rabid Tolkien-ites, I’m not implying that Tolkien was a bad writer. The fellowship was pretty set on going through Moria from the outset, and the deliberate interpretation of Gandalf on the bridge at Khazad-dûm, telling the fellowship to “fly, you fools,” being a coded message to go find some large birds, is peak fandom cope. I’m not even convinced by the idea that the lack of great eagle delivery reflects Tolkien’s Christian faith showing through in a predestination-esque ‘it will only happen this way’ word of God/Eru Iluvatar pronouncement.
Realistically, Tolkien just forgot. He was human; humans do that. Besides which, if the various plot lines of your book are as lengthy and complicated as those in The Lord of the Rings are, I think we can forgive the author for forgetting about some overgrown budgies. As far as plot holes go, it really isn’t breaking anything.
And that’s something you should keep in mind. You don’t need to go overboard and try to be a supercomputer and cover every random inconsequential detail. Audiences are not concerned with the mineral content of the rocks in every field, unless it directly impacts some part of the world or the your story. Audiences are reasonably forgiving of understandable oversights or authors accidentally painting themselves into corners and crawling up the walls to try to get out. If it’s entertaining and it doesn’t break anything, then they’re happy to have more of it.
For the sake of argument, let’s say you write a story rooted in the medieval fantasy stock setting. You probably have magic. And let’s say wizards have golems. What impact does that have on the economy? Because suddenly you’ve effectively introduced robotics into your setting, with all the attendant societal problems that robotics creates in the average sci-fi setting. Only your setting doesn’t have a futuristic knowledge economy to offset it. It’s all labour all the time. So logically, your golems are going to replace human labour more or less instantly unless you can figure out why they don’t.
And you might reply: “What are you talking about? I don’t care about any of that. I have golems because I want to hit something made of rock with a sword!” Hit a chunk of rock with a thin bit of metal, you say? Ah, I can see you’re exactly my target audience.
Does it matter!?
The standard sci-fi setting fluff is something along the lines of: Robotics become a commercially viable utility, displacing human manual labour and the lower classes, leaving large numbers of unemployed people to eke out a desperate living by whatever means available. The middle and upper classes continue tapping away on keyboards in high-rise offices. Funnily enough, the difficulties in integrating digital programs with real-world space have meant that office workers are actually the first to be threatened by the emergent crop of AI systems.
Anyway, if your stock feudal system is effectively nothing but manual labour, then golems replace everybody. And your answer might be: “Well, then my fantasy kingdom pulls a Sparta and everyone becomes a badass warrior instead! Ha, take that Mr. Pedant!” Fair enough. One question, imaginary creative person: if your enemy is made of flesh and you have a bunch of physically superior magic constructs made of materials that don’t bleed, feel fear, and are more or less impervious to medieval weaponry overall… why wouldn’t you just use golems as soldiers as well as labourers? You see the problem posed by introducing something like this?
And you might huff and puff and say, “Fine! The golems are hard to make because they need a special ingredient to power them, like a fancy rock that only grows around the arsehole of a dragon every 27 years! What do you think about that!?”
I think you’re getting somewhere, and your stock medieval fantasy setting is becoming less generic, imaginary creative person. Now, please tell me how your magic people go about extracting slow-growing magic rocks from the rectums of giant magic lizards. This sounds like an interesting bit of fluff with a bunch of implications…
Long ago I wrote about the problems with ‘fireball’. I believe I acknowledged at the time that most people don’t really care about whether or not they’re throwing a bottle rocket or a nuclear bomb around. Look, I get it; time is short and you’re more interested in the magic sword of boning than you are in theoretical magic physics. But you should also consider the idea that if the first questions that spring to mind are ‘yeah, but…’ then you are never going to be the only one thinking them. They aren’t edge cases, they’re holes in the logic of your setting. If you have too many holes then the whole thing crumbles. Worse still: the potential for not thinking about those awkward ‘yeah, but…’ questions and just handwaving them is that you relegate yourself to a generic setting. From generic settings emerge generic stories. And nobody cares about generic stories.
My point is that if Gandalf casts fireball in a location that is mostly composed of wood, your audience’s immersion is going to be broken if nothing is on fire because you thought that burning the immediate vicinity to the ground would disrupt subsequent scenes. Their immersion is going to be broken if Gandalf casts fireball in one scene and it’s an apocalyptic explosion, and he casts fireball in another scene and it’s conveniently more like lobbing a brick of charcoal. Everybody knows what you’re doing. Audiences forgive oversights; they do not forgive inconsistency.
To give a more worldbuilding-oriented example, there’s a now-tedious prevalence of fantasy civilisations that operate on ‘uh… slavery’, purely because whoever was writing them didn’t want to consider how that civilisation makes money. This is seemingly for no real reason other than slavery is easy to explain and framed as thematically tidy. Need generic bad guy? Deploy slavers. I can hear a mass of eyeballs rolling in their sockets, which means that ‘deploy slavers’ is a bad solution to an antagonist problem. By all means, have your slaver society… but at least have some understanding as to why it’s there in the first place. If your economy begins and ends with ‘feudalism?’ or ‘slavery?’ or ‘capitalism?’ you’re going to end up with multiple groups that function identically without intending to.
The Reddit-tier answer, of course, is that slavery was prevalent throughout history. Correct, and you still need to go away and think about it, prospective story writer, because for a start, not all slavery looked the same. The type of slave trade that the Renaissance era English started and the Americans industrialised, was different to the slavery that the Roman Empire practiced.
Let’s say we are headed in that direction, anyway. You might try Spartan-style slavery: that was brutal as hell and tends to evoke a great deal of resentment in anybody reading about it. Great, you’ve got your audience’s emotional investment. But it didn’t exist in a vacuum. There was a logic behind it, it had significant consequences for that society, and it was arguably a bit of a crutch on which that hyper-militarised culture was absurdly dependent on.
The 300-inspired manly men who man harder than any other man, man, are boring. The interesting bit is the house of cards-style societal structure that was built around this hyper-dependence on slave workers. That’s where the questions are, and the interesting details are.
So you start with an easy question: Why were they slavers in the first place? They didn’t wake up one day and decide they really needed to own some people because the idea was neat. So what was going on?
The Spartans called their slaves helots, which they captured from other parts of southern Greece. The helots seem to have massively outnumbered the Spartans, as illustrated by Herodotus, who commented that there were seven helots for every Spartan warrior at the Battle of Plataea in 479 BCE. Ancient historians were not necessarily the most accurate recorders the way modern scholars of history are, so it’s always worth taking numbers like 7-to-1 with a pinch of salt. Nevertheless, the Spartans responded to that fact by massively overcompensating and dumping all of their points into the military tech tree, at the expense of everything else. Some sources mention that the Spartans wouldn’t put their spears and shields down because they were scared that a slave would steal them. That is profoundly revealing.
There is so much you can do with an entire nation whose psychological framework is “If I don’t enslave them, they’ll kill me.” That kind of national paranoia is an absolute goldmine for narrative. And how much more interesting a motivation is ‘driven by fear’ over ‘for teh evulz!’ Add to this the seemingly massive haemorrhaging of the male Spartiates population, numbering 8,000 in 480 (Herodotus, Histories, Book 7) and falling to 1,500 in 371 (Xenophon, Hellenica, Book 6). How much more interesting and revealing is a slave society in the context of those social dynamics? And that’s just scratching the surface.
It’s about the process
Generic fantasy slaver faction #36145 is melatonin for your audience. There’s no depth or logic there, just a bunch of vague signals. Generic fantasy slaver faction #36145 doesn’t create the Krypteia. What’s the Krypteia? Go look it up, it’s mental. And that handful of details alone make the whole idea of Sparta, seen through a narrative lens, as a setting, way more compelling than what most fantasy and sci-fi authors come up with whenever they opt for ‘slaver nation’ and then just stop at the archetype. Don’t stop at the archetype!
That’s the kind of thing that asking awkward questions gets you. Why does your setting have a slaver nation? Because they’re terrified and projecting, and so they’ve decided to become the very thing that they fear being done to them. What are the consequences of that? Their societal structure ossifies until the point of collapse. Nonetheless, they’re still mythologised as historical badasses that everyone should emulate. And then what if another nation further down the line does the same thing? There’s easy foundations there for themes of history repeating or rhyming, or the weaponisation of national mythologies for political manipulation, etc.
If you don’t want to just rip off history (good for you), but you still want a slaver faction in your setting, then you might ask some of the following questions: Where are they getting their slaves from? Who is this pissing off? What happens if their source of slaves is cut off because they can’t raid or trade for them anymore? If they’re forced to get their slave trade from somewhere else, how much longer and more expensive is that? Not just in gold-per-head but in resources like food and manpower, and how significant is that investment? If that nation loses a ship full of slaves, and the crew with it, how much of a knock-on effect does that have? And on and on.
I’ve focused on slavers here because it’s an easy cliché that is prevalent in fiction but rarely goes beyond the surface. There are a million stories you can write by just doing a little bit more and asking some basic questions. The resulting details can become seeds for stories that are a million times more interesting than ‘slaves bad.’ Your audience already knows that slavery is bad. Do better.
Naturally, however, you can ask these kinds of questions for anything. More importantly, what you will often find is that in answering just one question, you will often come up with a bunch of new details or extra questions, that you are free to dive into at your leisure, which only serve to add more flesh and spark new ideas. You will get stuck on some of these, don’t worry about it.
You don’t need to answer everything; you don’t even need to cover all of the questions. For a start, the questions never end, but secondly you can pick one or two questions that align with your interests or themes and just deep dive on that specific area and the result is the same. The process is the point: In asking awkward questions and then answering them, you will answer them in a way that is unique to you, and the gradual accumulation of relevant idiosyncratic details reaches a critical mass wherein the weird path your brain took to get to that specific output is purely your own. That’s the refinement. Nobody else is going to give the exact same answer or make the same choices that you have. Congratulations, you’ve got something original.
That’s part of why Tolkien’s setting is Tolkien’s setting, despite about 100 years of people trying desperately to copy his homework. That’s pretty much the reason the cliché fantasy setting exists: because instead of having a reason to use dwarves and elves and giant spiders, people just threw those elements into their settings because ‘well, that’s what you do in fantasy, right?’ Wrong. And that’s why every dwarf in every subsequent fantasy series is greedy and standoffish (and Scottish for some reason?) and the elves are tedious and arrogant. Tolkien had a reason for portraying them like that, but everyone else just looked at what he did and assumed they had to do the same thing. Why? Because ‘well, that’s what you do in fantasy, right?’ Wrong.
How do you know when your setting is refined enough?
There’s an anecdote I vaguely remember, forgive me, but the details are fuzzy: someone had written some books and some guys wanted to make a game in the setting of their books. They invited the author around for an interview. The first thing they asked the author was how much a loaf of bread cost. The author, naturally, laughed and said ‘However much the story dictates.’
The point of my flawed recollection of that anecdote is that there is no hard and fast list of boxes that you check off and then you’ve got ‘an gud setting’. I think you gradually start to notice something become your own. The way in which you think about the details, the way those details start to impact the setting’s dynamics and would naturally direct narrative impacts within them, are the markers by which you will start to see yourself in your work.
This is actually one of the problems with 90 Deg. 5 H. I only ever expected it to be a short story, no longer than 20k words, so I didn’t put much thought into it when I started writing it. If I’d known I’d still be writing it, I’d have put more thought into the setting before I started.
It’s a bit like clay. Anybody can sit down and slap a few blobs of clay together in the vague semblance of a figure and call it a statue. However, it’s not going to be distinct from anybody else who does exactly the same thing and stops at the same place. Through a long and often tedious process of refinement and detailing, it becomes its own thing, and by extension, your thing.
If you can sit down with a narrative outline and run it through any part of your setting and encounter points at which you think ‘Oh, no, Character A couldn’t do Action B, because that would lead to Result C, so they’d have to take Actions D or E, instead’ then you’re on the right track.
If you can apply the same narrative outline to different settings or parts of the same setting and get wildly different results, especially if those results are significantly different to the obvious or cliché outcomes, then you’re definitely doing it right.
Words and Chaos 
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