If you’re a writer, and you likely are because you’ve decided to read this post, you have found yourself threshing through dozens, if not hundreds, of articles with similar titles such as this one. As writers, we read the essays, listen to panel considerations, and attend the tool-building seminars of our peers and inspirations like prospectors panning for gold. If you’re like me, you’ve found yourself sifting through YouTube videos where writers and storytellers and narrative designers, directors and playwrights and every creator of every chosen stripe effectively say, “This is how we built this fictional place.” Many of these videos can be effective guides. Some come from scientific perspectives, building your world from the soil up and focusing culture around resource or geographical location. Others come from the old school method of building a history of a place and a people before your ass is ever in the chair doing the work of drafting the story. And there’s the sociological method and the by-the-seat-of-your-pants method (a term that I deeply despise for personal reasons that are not important for this particular discussion, but I’m too angry of a human being not to mention) and the discovery method traditionally associated with J.R.R. Tolkien’s development of Middle Earth. All these different methods, each using particular toolboxes that usually center around a particular writer’s strengths, which build up within us, hopeful dreamers wanting to manufacture our own worlds, a collection of techniques we get to play with and try and fail and sometimes succeed. And I think that every writer worth reading has taken the time to study these techniques. Practiced them, and most importantly, learned that the study of the technique is, at times, more important than the technique itself. 

For me, the academic pursuit of those world building methods help set a foundation for what works best for this relatively obscure Houstonian writer. And I think the way I think about it might be a bit different from the populist styles of our modern period including the work of some of our present age’s famous world builders: George R.R. Martin and the gardening method, Brandon Sanderson with his Glacier Technique, Patrick Rothfuss’s unreliable narrator as world-builder, and Martha Wells, who uses a kind of societal landscape method to set the stage, and N.K. Jemisin’s deliciously unapologetic world building which revolves around cultural oppression, to name several. As a note: I would mention the author of the Harry Potter series here too, if I thought her neo-classical world building style was worth emulating, which I don’t. But that’s me. You do you, boo.

When I started writing my saga Amid the Vastness of All Else about seven years ago, I knew exactly two things: 

1. The first book would be entitled The Massacre at Yellow Hill
2. It was going to be in a Western setting. 

The title was appealing to me, having some messy sex appeal, so it stuck. The setting, well, perhaps it is my deep hatred of money and fame which led me to writing in the Western genre, or it was more about my belief in doing my part to help correct the Western genre, which you can learn more about here. (insert link to previous post) The challenge with world building at the outset is that your work will rely on the techniques and worlds of the writers who have come before and while all work is derivative of the art crafted before your time, it is much easier to see the strings of those influences when the influence is where you begin. Also, beginning at those genesis points removes a portion of the electric happiness which can spring in the drafting, thus eliminating the work’s ability to surprise you. Now, I will say, if you are writing in any kind of historical setting, you must do your research. You must understand the time and the cultural attitudes of that time. Few things are worse than a writer who has decided they have something to contribute to a literary conversation or well-worn genre, when they have no fucking clue as to the history of that genre or the challenges that genre has experienced. Do your research. If you are writing in a culturally sensitive time period or around a topic or people of which you are not a part, prepare yourself with research and fortify your work with sensitivity readers and peers who understand that setting and populations which will be affected by the work you hope to create. If you do not do this, you are setting yourself up for failure at best, and at worst being flippantly negligent; which for me, is a cardinal sin of the craft. Thus ends that rant. 

And so, I have a few rules that I think you might want to try out, see how they work for you. If they do work for you–fantastic. If they do not–then I’ll see you in court. 

Rule Number One: Get the Characters Talking

Now, I know, personally, how much we all love to doodle and scribble in our notebooks or fill our drafting software folders with inspirations and notes and pictures of places we want to incorporate into our latest magnum opus. We use those spaces as a spawning ground for inspiration, and I think they can be valuable when you are not actively drafting. In my view, how can I talk about a world I have never lived in? How can I describe but by way of parallel metaphor or counterfeit artifice of the world I have experienced? I don’t believe in playing God the way some authors seemingly find miraculous ways to do, building a world from dirt to mountain, sea to sky, and then populating that landscape with a sprawl of humanity. 

I prefer to start a world with a character, and as quickly as possible, get that character talking with another character the way, if you and I were to meet, normal people converse. As an example from my latest work-in-progress, let me show you what I mean. 

A simple setting of the stage is thus: 

Sir Christopher Tremain, paladin on errand given by way of his commander, has come to the desolated Kingdom of Analain. And brought unto the court of the monarch of Analain, Queen Teressa, Sir Christopher is heralded into the throne room, where the Queen and her advisors are asking how they know they can trust him to achieve their need.

Excerpt from Too Bright for Mortal Eyes:

Simon Voltaic asked, “Are the stories of your errands true?”

Before Christopher could answer, Queen Teressa set another question upon him. “Word comes to us from up the river Addlemont that you slayed Mallefax. Is this tale sincere?”

“It is true. I felled Mallefax, though it grieved me much,” said Sir Christopher.

“Grieved you,” said Simon, shaking his head. “That beast was the finalizer for countless innocents. The terror of the North when he came down from the mountain whenever his appetite for destruction led him from his den and back into the sky. And you were grieved to rid the world of him?”

Sir Christopher looked away from the advisor, placing his eyes on Teressa once again. “Your majesty, I am not a man of boast. My words are plain. True. And yes, I was grieved, greatly so. For Mallefax was ancient and beautiful, but too old to see reason and too powerful to compromise. We spoke. He would not listen. And so, his body lies just west of the White Sea River, where our battle commenced and concluded. Three days and nights we threw all our power against the other…his black flames melted stone and tree and grass, boiled the river waters to steam. But in the end, the boon of my voice saw me prevail. The strength of my song proving greater than the smelting hammer of his wild dragonfire."   

I began this story by introducing Sir Christopher, a knight who serves the realms he is sent to, by way of holy purpose. Classic knight-errant set-up, from Lady Bradamante to Sir Galahad to Roland Deschain, we are familiar with this wind-up. So Christopher up until this point relies upon that which the fantasy reader is familiar with, and he doesn’t start inhabiting the world until I get him to start talking about himself in it. And when Queen Teressa speaks to Christopher, she suddenly informed me that there is a river named the Addlemont in this world. Then, it starts to get fun when she asks “Is this tale sincere,” because I, as the writer, have no clue if it is or not. I only know that it’s time for Sir Christopher to tell me more about himself. 

He effectively says, “Yeah, what you heard is true. And it made me sad.” 

Simon Voltaic then further builds upon that feeling that Sir Christopher introduces, and Simon’s response not only sets up Sir Christopher to elaborate, but it allows Simon to tell me more about this destructive creature which had plagued the world. 

This forces Sir Christopher as a character to not only defend his feeling to the characters in the scene, but to also explain to me, the writer, more about himself by way of his past. And when we talk about ourselves and our past, we allow our by-the-numbers paladin to coat the black and white question with the color of his experience. For me, this is the Pinocchio moment, when the writer stops having control over a character and is henceforth compelled by the character now gifted animus. I give Sir Christopher space and setting to tell me about Mallefax, a creature I had no idea about until this moment. He then expands, telling me the story of this great and terrible battle which has left a scar on him. Christopher also lets me know that the place where the battle ended, the White Sea River, informing me that there must be a place where the Addlemont and the White Sea River junction.

The setting, the characters, and the perils which exist within the plot are suddenly birthed into the narrative, all because I just gave Christopher a chance to tell me, and the other characters, about his life in a scene where it makes sense for him to do so. And this, dear friends, is for me, the difference between a character who is written and a character who is alive. The difference between a world crafted and a world discovered. And this particular technique relies upon a kind of authorial vulnerability; a willingness to trust both the characters to do what is right by them and resign your book to their hopes and dreams, enthusiasms and fears. 

Rule Number Two: The People are the Place

How many wet city streets have we known? How many dawns and dusks? How many mountain-shadowed valleys and rivers which wind their way through rolling fields of ephemeral green all shot through with wildflower blossoms? All writers have their familiar places, the locations their hearts know best. For Steinbeck it was the Salinas Valley. James Baldwin built a country from Harlem in Go Tell It On the Mountain. Harper Lee gave us her version of Monroeville, Alabama in Mayville. And of course we have Melville’s Homeric Pacific, Ann Rice’s sultry New Orleans and Faulkner’s impoverished Yoknapatawpha County. When we think about these places, or I should say the vision of these places as provided to us by the voices of our American literary qui manent, we are given over to see not the world that is, but the world as they painted it. After all, Los Angeles belongs to Raymond Chandler in the same way San Francisco belongs to Dashiell Hammett, which when you throw in Steinbeck and Walter Mosely and Dorothy B. Hughes (who dots up Hollywood in shades of onyx and silver) pretty much gives us all the California Pulp we can imagine. And I contend…CONTEND, I SAY: That all an aspiring writer needs in order to master landscapes is the opening chapter of East of Eden, perhaps with a small, but equally important review of McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. 

But streets and sunlight, valleys and fields, even when they are so well-crafted that we lose ourselves in the present moment of our reality, they are only shapes and color and mood combinations that ring true to the reader’s ear. 

What really matters, in my view, what really defines a place is the people living inside it. The people are the place. And dear brothers and sisters of this, our most sacred craft, the people are the point. 

The Shire is a fine and lovely place, but it’s the Hobbits making a home Under the Hill that make us want to live there. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is a magnificent abuse of landscape description, but, for me, it’s Mort who makes me want to return time and time again. And those are examples of primary characters which, I admit, is a bit unfair. So, when it comes to using people to define a place, let me show you an example of how I used people to define my version of post Slaver’s Revolt (no I will not call it the Civil War), 1860s New Orleans in my alternate history Horror Western Baroness of the Eastern Seaboard.

Excerpt from Baroness of the Eastern Seaboard: 

Further down the length of the cobblestone road, tracing the dark, southwesterly bulge of massive Lake Pontchartrain, the gaslighted streets of New Orleans began to rumble and peal with the sound of drums and fiddles and fifes and horns. The road narrowed, forking like a shimmering stone river spraying to delta. Soiled doves called down from cathouses painted green and gold and the kind of blue found in the farthest reach of a summer day sky. Some made promises of love and unforgettable nights, others brandished their breasts or pressed their naked torsos against covered balconies so that the tuft of their pubis could be spied. Larry and Sven rode, smiling and tipping their hats and shaking their heads. Well-to-do Creole men in various stages of lechery, dressed in fine linen suits called up to the women, throwing them kisses and making promises of their own.

One man, a foppish youth no older than twenty-five by the look of him, drunkenly challenged another man leaving one of the buildings to a knife fight for some unknown offense. Sven and Larry rode between challenger and challenged, which gave the youth’s friends enough time to cool his temper and think better of what might happen should the contest be had. And pulling the young man away, the friends soothed his temper with a bottle of wine. And the young man, drinking, suddenly laughed. The wine sprayed from his lips, soiling his silk shirt with a wash of red.

The friend who had made the young man laugh lifted his voice. “Better the color on you than out of you, Maurice!” They carried on with their jesting down a length of dark alleyway, unafraid of the night or the fog or the life ahead of them. 

Sven watched them. Wondered where they were going and how long their fraternity might last. 

Larry, who saw Sven looking, said, “Lucky.”

Sven turned and winked at Larry. “Not nearly as lucky as us.”

They rode together, admiring the narrow streets, the music filling them, and the people living with passions thrown high. The city of New Orleans, from the bend of the Mississippi to the banks of Pontchartrain, boiled with life and fervor and the unrelenting will to cast all care into the void of the night — A city that would live forever. The riders took it all in, pointing out the midnight shops selling their wares and roiling saloons populating the churning maelstrom that was French Quarter. Bourbon Street, the most furious section of the happy storm, was festooned with flags of purple and gold and trimmed in tassels of green hanging from balconies and flagpoles and the shoulders of a naked man who walked among the world with the colors of the city like a cape. In the windows of restaurants were men and women having fine meals long past midnight. And in the faces of every living person was the sheer, drunken bliss served only in the rarest of places, none rarer than this.

Now, that was a lot, I know. And you may be thinking, “C.S., now, you told me that the people were the place and the people were the point, but there was a hell of a lot of location description in those passages.” And you would be right, if those details were the primary identifiers of theme and life in the passage. See, I do my best to set the stage, but then I go on to describe a brothel without ever telling you that is what the building is. I show you the women of that establishment. I show you the men who are their potential customers. Then I introduce a young man ready to duel another man for the sake of some unnamed slight. It’s those people that make New Orleans lived in. And it tells my reader, right at the front of the book, that this story is about two carnal forces: Love and Violence. Then, I go on to tell you a little more about New Orleans, and the unchaste revelry persisting within that city’s borders by introducing a naked man, striding with the pride of spring, caped by the colors of the city he loves best. And then we throw a little cherry on top, letting the reader know that this city does not sleep, with the people enjoying dinners long past midnight, because the city itself is not confined by the proper dietary timings of bullshit puritanical American manners.

New Orleans, I do my best to make her feel lived in, but it’s the people in the novel that, in my opinion, gets the job done.  

Now listen, please don’t hear this relatively obscure Houstonian author saying, “This is how it’s done.” I am never saying that. And none of the expressions of these kinds of techniques are built for self-satisfaction or self-aggrandizement. They are only a way of saying, “Here’s what works for me,” and more importantly, “Take a look at my work, and then show me yours.” One of the challenges I see in the writing community today is an unwillingness to be both bold and vulnerable when discussing the techniques we use as writers. Some of you may have gotten to the bottom of this long-ass post and said, “This mother fucker right here is all full of shit.” But I am sure there are a few, or at least one or two, who thought to themselves, “That sounds fun, I’ll try that next time.”

And I always appreciate being able to talk about this beloved craft of ours, and express my own work with perhaps a maverick appeal. A maverick may go his own way but he doesn’t think that it’s the only way or ever claim that it’s the best one, except maybe for himself. So, bring forth your thoughts and insight and criticisms, because in my view, that’s how all of us build community. It’s how we all get better.

Amid the Vastness of All Else is available now in eBook and paperback everywhere books are sold, including our direct shop.