Oh, how I wish I were down there with you guys at ARRC, and not just because it's below-freezing here in the States! Alas, airfares and deadlines conspire against me...
Our Kind Hosts invited us here to share in the experience as best we can, via pixels and phosphors. So, I thought -- well, what can I offer? What panel would they put me, someone who started out in the fantasy/SF/horror genres, on? (Other than the dating=horror one that I keep suggesting...)
And then I thought, well, world-building.
My Retrievers series is set in NYC. Manhattan, to be exact – a boro I worked in for fifteen years. I know it pretty well; how long it takes to walk from Point A to Point B, what subway lines run the best, where there are great places to eat, and where you can’t grab a cab for love or money. But I have a secret to share:
If you try to use Wren’s New York as a map to visiting the real New York City, you will be hopelessly, if entertainingly lost.
And I did it on purpose.
World-building is an essential part of creating believable fantasy – and by 'believable' I mean that you are able to enter the world without hesitation, that the foundation of the society makes intuitive sense to the reader, even when the details are different from the 'real.' Or, in another way of putting it: if you're going to ask them to suspend disbelief, you'd better give them a sturdy chair to stand on. Doubly so when you're setting it in 'our' world.
Yes, Times Square is on 42nd Street. Having the right theater located on the corner of 44th and 7th? Not so important. Harvard University is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Get that right, and you can move the admissions office to another building, or add a new biology lab as needed. The V&A Museum in London can suddenly have another wing, and if you added a church to a neighborhood in Rome, odds are good that nobody would squalk.
Because world-building – no matter what the genre – isn't about drawing a map, real or imaginary. It's about telling a story. Sometimes that means that you use what is real – and sometimes you change it, blurring the lines between what is real and factual and what is unreal and fanciful, until one is just as likely (or unreal) as the other.
Respect what makes a city that particular city – infuse its character into the descriptions – and you'll earn auctorial license to move particulars around a little, as needed. Because in the end, the only thing a writer can do – the only thing a writer should do – is make readers want to visit her world.
So what story-places have you believed in so much that you wanted to visit?
Whether you are a reader or an author, we all have houses filled with books. Some are piled, some are in tubs under the bed, some take pride of place on the bookshelf. But the question is, how do you organise your bookshelf?
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