Analysing the Brutal and the Travelling
Continuing on from Analysing the Lost, the Itinerant and the Fractal, and the three stories analysed in that piece (Builder, Storyteller and Now, respectively), here is a second analysis piece on the continuation of two stories (though not the third, for reasons which will become apparent in due course).
The two stories in question are the Brutal Builder and The Travelling Storyteller, both continuations of their respective worlds. Now the two stories are almost completely opposing representations of the same concept: when to use worldbuilding. The Storyteller focuses on the importance of detail in describing very small worlds, and the importance of making sure that the details still link in with the world. The builder on the other hand is more about setting aside sheafs of painstakingly created backdrop because it isn’t actually that important.
Lets start with the Travelling Storyteller.
As we have already established, the Storyteller doesn’t much care for reality. The theme of deliberate continuity slip-ups continues, and here is supplemented by extra terms such as ‘plot hook’ and ‘fourth wall shielding’; terms for narrative devices that have been turned into actual devices in keeping with the idea that this world is based around stories.
The world in question is a small slice of the SS Unfathomable, a ship designed to aid in getting between stories. Narratively, having a device capable of plucking you arbitrarily out of one story and placing you into another is a lot easier than trying to construct some framework for how the protagonists move between stories. While it’s possible to do so (Here There Be Dragons and the Chronicles of Narnia being examples of stories where people jump between worlds), it’s a lot easier if there is an arbitrary thing available. As the storyteller’s abilities become more constrained as the rules of the story get tighter, so do the ship’s abilities (both in the world I’m building and in the way the story would have to be structured). For this reason I left the world of the ship as vague as possible.
There are only two parts of the ship that are ‘seen’ in the story (as the rest of the ship is still irrelevant). We know there is a room where the ‘plot hook’ (a device used for plucking people out of narrative streams) is, which is deep in the ship somewhere. We also know there is a bridge, a room of unknowable purpose with a multitude of controls available. The rest of the ship is only vaguely hinted at near the end, though the lack of a journey through the rest of the ship is held up as another example of how story and meta-story intertwine. The bridge is where we get to the real crux of this analysis.
Everything on the bridge serves a purpose of some kind, even though I (both as writer and worldbuilder) might not know what it is yet. The sheer busyness of the description of the bridge leaves multiple avenues of exploration open, again leaving the purpose of almost all of the controls utterly unknown. The details matter here: This is a small world, so it has to be finely crafted in order to avoid the appearance of being crude or simply becoming another ‘location’ in the story rather than a world in its own right. By the end I want the SS Unfathomable to almost be a character, and so every seemingly erroneous stuffed mouse is actually an important detail.
Thanks to the world I’ve already started building around the Storyteller what the details actually are doesn’t matter all too much, though I did want to make sure that no matter what happened the Unfathomable would be able to cope. Find yourself trying to fly through a magical storm? Get on the Occult Slab and put mana into some runes. Plunging into a computer-generated hellscape? Those touchpads will come in handy. Anything else? Stroke the mouse. It might not do anything but it’ll probably calm your nerves a little. This is the linking of world to detail, and the reason I bring it up is because while describing every little piece of the bridge I kept in my mind the overriding principle of this world: The story is more important than what makes sense in reality. The bridge of the SS Unfathomable is built for multiple stories, not multiple realities, and throwing in details from multiple genres ensures that.
Which brings us to the crew of the Unfathomable. An engineer who seems comfortable with both high technology and magic, two sisters who seem to have a lot of skill with various arcane disciplines, a bombastic Knight and an alien medic. At least two we know were picked up by the Storyteller as their own stories became tragic (a pattern, perhaps?). Between them they represent a series of styles of writing and potential worlds, and thanks to both the Storyteller and the SS Unfathomable I can now explore them with impunity, and thanks to both the amount of detail and the ambiguity with which it is handled the SS Unfathomable should be able to handle anything.
The builder, on the other hand, was painful to write.
A while ago on Worldbuilding I asked a question about bonegrass, a fast-growing predatory plant. A comment on my question made me realise it couldn’t possibly be natural, an answer got me thinking about the rest of the ecosystem, and from there I developed a vast and complex world (where world, in this context, means area where the bonegrass extends its influence). I asked some more followup questions and also filled in blanks about all manner of other topics on my own. Here’s a selection of things that I thought about and developed in the process:
Bonegrass
Flesh Moles
Marrow Adders
Crimson Pheasants
Flensermites
The original purpose of Bonegrass
Skull Slugs
The Whispering Death
Shield Mice
Mycolesions
Bonegrass savannah survival tactics
Periscope Hawks
Of that list only two things are mentioned by name, only 5 are alluded to in more than a passing manner and the thing that makes the bonegrass so terrifying (the fact that it puts you to sleep then grows through you in order to get nutrients) is completely skipped over with the small hanging lantern of ‘While I had no doubt there were very good reasons for her chewing dung I didn’t want to know more’.
It’s background. It makes perfect sense in the story to use bonegrass. For suitably prepared people it is a wonderful hiding spot, and the reason for planting it is one that makes perfect sense in the wider world (which is being exploited by ‘offworlders’), but to explain the whys and wherefores of Flensermite breeding behaviour and how that leads to the medical condition known as Whispering Death is almost entirely superfluous (also quite grim, as with pretty much everything else bonegrass-related).
The result of this is that all the work and detail I put into developing the world of the bonegrass savannah isn’t needed here. While writing I had to make a conscious choice whether or not to include any of the elements, and in the end I only included the ones that it made sense to. As it turns out the story took a turn which allowed me to exploit one of the properties of how a person would survive in the bonegrass (using semi-domesticated Flesh Moles to keep the bonegrass at bay) and turn it into a story element (The Builder smashing though to the tunnels to make a better barricade). That wouldn’t have been possible without a detailed world in which to write, but similarly I wouldn’t have had to make the decision to exclude the Shield Mice (possibly the only nice thing about that particular world).
The way the Builder story is going the wider world is very soon going to become an issue, with the introduction of a menacing off-world military organisation and mention of artefact trading. That world doesn’t have quite the same level of pre-made detail as the Bonegrass fields (yet) but it’s not quite as vaguely detailed as the world of the Storyteller.
Which I think is a nice balance.
