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Apr. 22nd, 2006 06:09 pmJust now I am contemplating what makes a culture and society work in a novel. I am reading Glenda Larke's work and it strikes me that her worlds are a lot more convincing that those of a lot of other writers. When you get down to it, though, she doesn't have a great deal more information than many fantasy novels, and she definitely has less than some. Why do her worlds work?
At Conjure a group of us talked about that historical fiction term "telling detail". It isn't the amount of background you add to your novel, though the amount of effort you spend worldbuilding most definitely helps. The important thing is what detail you select. And Glenda chooses her detail with extraordinary care. If she mentions physical differences between people of different race she uses them in the plot at some time, and if she mentions the economy or the effect of the weather on a crop then that comes into play later.
Her worlds work because she mimics the sense we sometimes get in our own lives: that things are interlinked and complex. She streamlines her narrative by making use of different aspects of society and making sure we see those aspects from several points of view (never just 'sheep' - sheep in fields, cloth in market, wool on someone's back)and so she indicates to us that these societies are complex and functional. The detail is *so* telling, that we can infer much more from her hints than is said on the page.
The other thing she does is not explain things fully. She keeps up more than one explanation for major phenomena as long as she can, and she gives evidence that seems to back up and that seems to break down more than one set of explanation. The funny thing is she doesn't do this at a high level: it works though. It tells us to suspend disbelief on *both* sets of explanations if we want to follow the character that believes that idea. So we do. And so we enter even more fully into her created world and start to measure the quality of the cloth as we enter the market, and to wonder if wool is really the right fabric or if we should go the distance and get our local haberdasher to import some selver.
And that is the strongest argument I can think of for thinking about how that world needs to appear in the book at least as much as you think about building your world in the first place. When a writer gets the appropriate detail -the telling detail - and links it closely into plot and people then fantasy and SF reading becomes a whole new ballgame. We feel as if we are entering those strange lands ourselves.
At Conjure a group of us talked about that historical fiction term "telling detail". It isn't the amount of background you add to your novel, though the amount of effort you spend worldbuilding most definitely helps. The important thing is what detail you select. And Glenda chooses her detail with extraordinary care. If she mentions physical differences between people of different race she uses them in the plot at some time, and if she mentions the economy or the effect of the weather on a crop then that comes into play later.
Her worlds work because she mimics the sense we sometimes get in our own lives: that things are interlinked and complex. She streamlines her narrative by making use of different aspects of society and making sure we see those aspects from several points of view (never just 'sheep' - sheep in fields, cloth in market, wool on someone's back)and so she indicates to us that these societies are complex and functional. The detail is *so* telling, that we can infer much more from her hints than is said on the page.
The other thing she does is not explain things fully. She keeps up more than one explanation for major phenomena as long as she can, and she gives evidence that seems to back up and that seems to break down more than one set of explanation. The funny thing is she doesn't do this at a high level: it works though. It tells us to suspend disbelief on *both* sets of explanations if we want to follow the character that believes that idea. So we do. And so we enter even more fully into her created world and start to measure the quality of the cloth as we enter the market, and to wonder if wool is really the right fabric or if we should go the distance and get our local haberdasher to import some selver.
And that is the strongest argument I can think of for thinking about how that world needs to appear in the book at least as much as you think about building your world in the first place. When a writer gets the appropriate detail -the telling detail - and links it closely into plot and people then fantasy and SF reading becomes a whole new ballgame. We feel as if we are entering those strange lands ourselves.