5 Ways to Build a Detailed World Without Boring Your Readers

Photo by InterdimensionalGuardians. Interesting.

Photo by InterdimensionalGuardians. Interesting.

It’s the year 2053. Earth has made first contact with an extraterrestrial race; socialist aliens who reproduce asexually. You, now a literary giant, are tasked with adapting a sample of Earth literature for the aliens to enjoy. The book is Pride and Prejudice.

You open your well-worn copy to that famous first sentence, It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife…and you break down in tears, realizing this tale of class and marriage will mean absolutely nothing to your audience.

Universal truth, your foot!

Yet this is the challenge science fiction and fantasy writers face every day.

We create whole new worlds to house our stories, then find ourselves struggling to keep up the pace while stopping the action every few paragraphs for a history lesson.

But we don’t have to! With a few tricks of Show, Don’t Tell, we can show our readers a lot about our world without slipping into exposition. The close-up details of our heroes’ personal lives can reveal the big picture of the world they live in.

Like so:

1. Your protagonist’s job

…and the jobs of the people he knows say a lot about your world. If they’re all farmers, your readers see an agrarian community. Make him a moisture farmer in a desert, shopping for robots, and he’s Luke Skywalker. Or make him a starship repairman or a dragon breeder. Whatever the occupation, in one conversation with buddies at the pub about how hard work has been this week and what the government is up to, you can cover:

  • The major industries of your world
  • Who controls them / has the power
  • The biggest problems with society

More useful tools along these lines:

  • Living quarters (cave, tent, cryotube, barracks, fortress?)
  • School/studies (from a blacksmith’s apprenticeship to a mind control science project)
  • News reports (from the town crier announcing the war to a psychic message about falling nanobot stock prices)

2. Your protagonist’s relationships

How was he raised? Does he live with the wife and kids? The wives and kid? Seven generations of his family? Coworkers, classmates, cellmates, refugees? No one at all? This all reveals:

  • The society in your world
  • The structure of the family
  • Barriers between the classes

3. Your protagonist’s traditions

Does he pray before he eats? Does he have to slay a beast to be acknowledged a man? When he attends a funeral, is he watching a body buried, burned, scattered, eaten, or recycled? Do they even have funerals? This reveals:

  • Religion – who they worship, where they came from, where they go when they die
  • History – holidays can be used to reenact important points in history

Traditions can include:

  • Daily rituals: getting up, going to sleep, eating
  • Life events: birth, coming-of-age, marriage, parenthood, funerals
  • Holidays: festivals and fasts

*Pro tip: A liturgy, specifically words sung or recited at any of these events, can be an especially handy way to sneak in detail.

4. Your protagonist’s speech

Language, slang, shop talk, and industry buzzwords are all great tools to both plant clues and add personality to your world. For instance, your can make up your own:

  • Terms of endearment or insult (honey, jerk)
  • Titles (husband, wife, king, priest)
  • Curse words (…)
  • Greetings (hello, hi, good day, hey y’all, yo)

5. Use the appendices, Luke!

Your readers will usually be able to interpret casual references to foreign concepts by the context. But to include more detail, you can always add appendices at the back of the book. Tolkien and Herbert, renowned for their world-building in Lord of the Rings and Dune, both did it. Use footnotes to lead readers to things like:

  • Glossary of terms
  • Translations of foreign words
  • Maps
  • Summary of religion and history

What are some of your ideas for showing your world to readers? Tell me in the comments!

Thanks to Sky for suggesting this topic! If you have a writing question you want answered, leave it in the Suggestion Box!

little green men

Great show-don’t-tell world-building tips for sci-fi/fantasy writers.

 

Review: Ginger Software

After my Grammarly review, another proofreading software company offered me a premium trial to do a review. This one I’d never heard of – Ginger, a startup out of Tel Aviv. This video shows it best:

Ginger specializes in helping people who are learning English as a second language). According to the website, it uses “patent-pending technology to decipher the semantic meaning and context of text input, by comparing it to billions of similar sentences from the Web.”

Ginger’s emphasis on semantics and context, combined with its home country of Israel, made me interested right away – as I understand it, Hebrew is a language even more complex than English, in that a single word can have many meanings (mah-kor means both “origin/source” and “bird beak”!) – therefore Hebrew-speakers are even more dependant on context than the average English speaker, and therefore presumably specially qualified to create a software like this.

AT A GLANCE

Ginger beats both Grammarly and Writing Dynamo right out of the gate for two reasons:

  1. Pricing model.
    • Free version (not sure the difference between this and basic)
    • Basic version = $4.90/month OR one-time payment of $39
    • Premium version = one-time payment of $89

What??? Nobody else is doing a one-time payment model! That’s awesome.

  1. Integration with MS Word

No cut/paste, no uploading documents. No restricting yourself to a few thousand words at a time. Download Ginger and it becomes a convenient yet unobtrusive button at the top of the window when you open Word, and reviews all your text in-doc with a click. FINALLY SOMEONE UNDERSTANDS MY NEEDS! (This is currently available on Windows only. They are working on a Mac version.)

THE NITTY GRITTY

I ran the same tests I ran on Grammarly (which I stole from blog Grammarist):

  • Obvious Spelling Errors – Ginger catches them all, beating Grammarly.
  • Less Obvious Spelling Errors (like “form” instead of “from”) – Ginger catches all, beating Grammarly
  • Grammar and punctuation mistakes – Ginger is split. It makes fewer mistaken corrections than Grammarly did, but fails to catch some problems, including dangling modifiers.
  • Questionable Style Choices – Ginger does as poorly as Grammarly.
  • Commonly Misused Words – Ginger does as poorly as Grammarly, but makes fewer mistaken corrections than Grammarly did.
  • Commonly Confused Words – Ginger catches two out of five, which is two better than Grammarly.
  • Redundancies – Ginger does as poorly as Grammarly, but makes fewer mistaken corrections.
  • Troublesome Compounds – Better than Grammarly, but a little strange. For instance, for the sentence “We are already to go” instead of suggesting “We are all ready to go,” Ginger suggested “We are already going.”
  • New Words, Colloquialisms and Nonstandard Variants – Ginger loses to Grammarly by just a little – suggesting “computer mice” instead of mouses.
  • American English vs. British English – Ginger wins for being adjustable between US and UK English, though while it catches “odor/odour,” it failed to catch problems with some other examples. I ran a few more of my own tests for comparison – it caught four out of six issues. Not bad.
  • Grammar Myths – Ginger ties with Grammarly.

 

EXTRA NOTES

PRO: Ginger did catch some mistakes neither I nor MS Word caught.

CON: Instead of proofing all at once and showing you the problems all at once, it proofs one sentence at a time while you watch – you can see the sentences flash at the top of the screen – and only stops when it’s found something wrong. The proofer automatically shuts off when you click to another window, so you have to wait while it works, and you can’t do anything else on your computer in the meantime.

PRO: Since they gave me a Premium trial I got to try out the text-to-speech reader. While it lacked the inflection of a human reader, it did offer the options of male or female voice, US or UK accent, so I had a lot of fun hearing my words read aloud by robot Emma Thompson.

WEIRD: Ginger also has a “Sentence Rephraser” which suggests different ways you can say things (usually synonyms). Sometimes its suggestions were helpful, other times troubling. For “She wondered if they would invite her to play with them” Ginger suggested “She wondered if they would pay for her to flirt with them.” What?!?

 

CONCLUSION

This is a tough one, especially since, as a native English speaker, I’m not in Ginger’s target audience. I do think Ginger would be helpful for someone who struggles a lot with spelling and major grammar issues, thought they shouldn’t depend on it solely. Compared to what else I’ve seen, the price and the functionality are the best. In its current condition, it’s not much use to me, personally, but I would keep an eye on it for updates.

Inspiration Monday: Silk Prison

Saw Star Trek: Into Darkness last night. Brilliant. My favorite part? A toss between Benedict Cumberbatch’s billowing coat, and everything else. My hopes for J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars have never been higher.

Ah, here’s something to do while we wait!

Chris S.

DJMatticus

ARNeal

ArdenRR

WritingSprint

Barb

MrPerfect

Carrie

The Rules

There are none. Read the prompts, get inspired, write something. No word count minimum or maximum. You don’t have to include the exact prompt in your piece, and you can interpret the prompt(s) any way you like.

OR

No really; I need rules!

Okay; write 200-500 words on the prompt of your choice. You may either use the prompt as the title of your piece or work it into the body of your piece. You must complete it before 6 pm CST on the Monday following this post.

The Prompts:

SILK PRISON**

WAITING FOR AN ANSWER

MIND CLUTTER

WHAT’S IN THE BAG

STAYING UP EARLY

Want to share your Inspiration Monday piece? Post it on your blog and link back to today’s post; I’ll include a link to your piece in the next Inspiration Monday post. No blog? Email your piece to me at bekindrewrite (at) yahoo (dot) com. (I do reserve the right to NOT link to a piece as stated in my Link Discretion Policy.)

Plus, get the InMon badge for your site here.

Happy writing!

** Thanks to Carrie for inspiring this prompt!

Great Free Research Resource for Writers

I have a post about a new proofreading software 95% done. But I just don’t think I have the last 5%  in me tonight. It has been a long week and a longer day. So instead, I’ll leave you with a super cool research resource I recently discovered.

Photo by Brett Jordan

Photo by Brett Jordan

We writers are always having to do research on the strangest things. Wikipedia articles don’t always cut it, and reading non-fiction books severely cuts into our fiction-reading time. If we’re lucky, we might happen to come across just the right special on the History or Discovery channel, but we wonder how much of that is just sensationalism, and how many important details we are missing.

Introducing…free online lectures! From respected universities! On almost any subject you can think of! Some are audio, some are video, all are free. Among the lectures I’ll be listening to:

  • The Roman World
  • Science, Magic and Religion
  • Literature and Psychoanalysis
  • Science Fiction and Politics

The site is OpenCulture.com/FreeOnlineCourses

Now isn’t your mind just buzzing with curiosity?

Inspiration Monday: The Man with No Name

Eating Sour Patch Kids and wondering what “invert sugar” is. It’s the second ingredient. Is that like the opposite of sugar? Genetically modified to reverse the effects of the first ingredient? Is it going to mutate me into an unrecognizable whatsit?

Also, are Sour Patch Kids just the older, jaded version of Jelly Babies?

These are the questions that plague me.

Let us read these to calm our minds:

Chris (when I missed him last week) and another (this week)

Roland offers an interest post on pacing and timelines

PinkWoods

Oscar

Barb

Kate

MrPerfect

Carrie

The Rules

There are none. Read the prompts, get inspired, write something. No word count minimum or maximum. You don’t have to include the exact prompt in your piece, and you can interpret the prompt(s) any way you like.

OR

No really; I need rules!

Okay; write 200-500 words on the prompt of your choice. You may either use the prompt as the title of your piece or work it into the body of your piece. You must complete it before 6 pm CST on the Monday following this post.

The Prompts:

THE MAN WITH NO NAME

ALWAYS UNDERESTIMATED

TRAINED FROM BIRTH

CUT AND PASTE

MASTERPIECES

Want to share your Inspiration Monday piece? Post it on your blog and link back to today’s post (here’s a video on how to do it); I’ll include a link to your piece in the next Inspiration Monday post. No blog? Email your piece to me at bekindrewrite (at) yahoo (dot) com. (I do reserve the right to NOT link to a piece as stated in my Link Discretion Policy.)

Plus, get the InMon badge for your site here.

Happy writing!

* MC = Mature Content.

Opinions expressed in other writers’ InMon pieces are not necessarily my own.