The Importance of Worldbuilding

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a long time, but I haven’t been able to get my head around it. (Not to mention I have been so swamped with work that I don’t have time to sleep, let alone blog.) I acknowledge that I am longwinded and prosaic on a good day and this post promised to be a monster. I apologise for the impending tl;dr, but I want to discuss something that is near and dear to my heart as a reader, writer, and now fledgling editor.

Middle Earth

If you can’t tell by the map of Middle Earth, I want to talk about worldbuilding because I have a theory about the “best” books having the best “worlds” built into them. Of course, I am coming at this with a decided fantasy bias, but bear with me here. I think a lot of readers want to get lost in a “world” as much as the story or a character’s inner thoughts and that setting as its own force in a work is sometimes overlooked or downplayed.

One of the agents at Ye Olde Literary Agency (I suppose, by now I can “out” El Jefe as Al Zuckerman and the agency as Writers House) put it best on his Publishers Marketplace page:

I love stories that introduce me to new worlds — or even better, recreate the ones I may already know.

- Dan Lazar

I think “recreate the ones I may already know” is the best way of putting it I’ve read in a long time. Worldbuilding isn’t just for science fiction and fantasy novels, but for all the other genres in between.

Here is a list of books (including graphic novels) I love that I think have great worldbuilding:

• THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J. R. R. Tolkien
• HARRY POTTER by J. K. Rowling
• KUSHIEL’S DART by Jacqueline Carey
• HIS DARK MATERIALS by Philip Pullman
• THE HUNGER GAMES by Suzanne Collins
• MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA by Arthur Golden
• GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING by Tracy Chevalier
• THE RED TENT by Anita Diamant
• SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD by Orson Scott Card
• 1984 by George Orwell
• The SANDMAN series by Magical Uncle Neil Gaiman
• V FOR VENDETTA by Alan Moore

Here is a list of books with great worldbuilding that are bestsellers that I didn’t especially love but can understand why they’re so popular:

• TWILIGHT by Stephenie Meyer
• THE DA VINCI CODE by Dan Brown

Obviously, I can’t address every single book on these lists, but I’ll try and explain as best I can what I mean. I’ll start with LORD OF THE RINGS, because it’s arguably the best known.

LORD OF THE RINGS and Secondary Worlds

About a year ago, I wrote a gigantic post about fantasy and its evolution: how it went from fairy tales and Lord Dunsany to epic fantasy to urban fantasy. I will single out Tolkien because he’s still the most famous and a top seller (despite being, you know, dead).

I first read THE HOBBIT when I was about eight or nine, when my Dad used to read to me before I went to sleep. I went on to finish the rest of the series a few years later and had a long, protracted phase where I dressed up as Éowyn and even went so far as to learn Tolkien’s Elvish languages–Sindarin and Quenya. (Yes, I am an unabashed nerd, but I embrace it. Only now I can’t remember how to say anything except “The Dwarf is fat” in High Elvish: I Nauco na tiúca.)

My favourite books as a child were the ones in which I could pretend to be myself and still play in the world. For instance, I wasn’t actually Éowyn when I dressed up–I was someone like her who had dark hair and rode horses and I even made up an elaborate history for myself in which I was the descendent of an Elf and a Man, was raised in Minas Tirith, but lived in Rohan, etc. (See? Unabashed nerd. Also, this was the child version of self-insertion fanfiction.) And this was possible in Middle Earth because the world extended far beyond the story contained within its pages.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

HARRY POTTER was the next book that caught my interest in this way. I was 12 when the first book came out, and I vividly recall talking with my friends which House we’d be sorted into if we went to Hogwarts (for the record it’s RAVENCLAW ALL THE WAY, BABY). While I was always excited to find out what happened to Harry & Company when the next book was released, I gradually came to realise that I relished the little details of his wizarding world almost as much. I mean, owl mail. And quills. And the blending of old-fashioned clothing and modern life. Wizarding rock. The clever puns (Newt Scamander!). And as with the best fantasy works, you could create your own stories that existed outside of Harry’s and it would still work because J. K. Rowling’s world was intuitive that way. Look at the fanfiction that sprang up!

In college, I found a niche of people who adored HIS DARK MATERIALS as much as I did for much the same reasons I did: its retelling of Milton’s PARADISE LOST and Blake’s THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, but what captured our interest the most was the concept of daemons. Lou Reed Girlfriend and I would discuss what our daemons would be if they had physical form, the daemons of the people we knew, and why this particular animal suited a person so. (My daemon, by the way, is an ocelot.) Again, Lyra’s world extended far beyond her story and we the readers could play in it and discover its nuances for ourselves.

MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA and Literary Worldbuilding

Memoirs of a Geisha

While fantasy is the genre with which I am the most familiar, worldbuilding is crucial to other novels. I cite MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA as an example because as much as it is Sayuri’s story of her rise to stardom and success, it’s also a glimpse into the tantalizing world of “modern” courtesans. The details of learning how to play instruments, about the stratification of geisha specializations (dancers are “better” than shamisen players), the “politics” of maintaining relationships with not only your clients but your teahouse mistress–it was all fascinating and in no way pedantic because it is a world different from ours, but also incredibly familiar in less obvious ways. Anita Diamant’s THE RED TENT is similar in this respect: the details of Biblical life reimagined from a female perspective are absorbing because it’s a story we know, told to us differently.

Setting is as much a character as the protagonist and the surrounding “cast”. New York is practically her own person in so many novels from Mark Helprin’s WINTER’S TALE to Edith Wharton’s THE AGE OF INNOCENCE to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY. The South of William Faulker’s work and Tennessee William’s plays. It’s not necessarily lush description of a setting so much as its scope beyond the book–that you feel you could enter the book and meet an inconsequential person with his or her own history and the world around you is complete.

This can be difficult with a setting that has a corresponding real world place, but what makes a work of fiction with great worldbuilding stand out is the implicit understanding the writer creates about the values of the society in which the novel is set. 19th century New York is not 21st century New York. Of course we know that, but a really skillful writer can craft a novel in which the setting is the Best Supporting Actor for the narrative. THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA by Lauren Weisberger is a contemporary title, but one of the best parts about it was learning about the culture of the fashion industry in New York City.

Postapocalyptic and Dystopian Worldbuilding

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

I’m a sucker for a great postapocalyptic/dystopian novel. I love dystopian novels in particular: HUNGER GAMES by Suzanne Collins and 1984 by George Orwell are two examples I love. Dystopia-disguised-as-utopia is just as good, if not better: THE GIVER by Lois Lowry and BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley are two more books that address this. Dystopian is especially great for recreating the worlds you already know. Great dystopian novels will address current societal values by imagining a setting in which they are either obsolete or taken to a frightening extreme. HUNGER GAMES is the most recent and I think, the most relevant to today. We live in a world that views violence as amusement as well as a society that willingly embraces fabrication as reality. Voyeurism has never been more entertaining.

When I listened to Suzanne Collins talk at the awesome YA author event at Books of Wonder, she addressed the significance of bread in THE HUNGER GAMES. The country is named Panem, which is Latin for bread. Peeta is a baker’s son. Each district has a different type of bread that represents its industry. “Bread” as a metonym for food–for sustenance–is critical to Katniss and her family. She does, after all, fight to the death for a chance to save her family from starvation.

The phrase panem et circenses forms such a large part of THE HUNGER GAMES and its world. The phrase originates from a satire by the Roman poet Juvenal and nowadays it refers to the derision of “an infantilized populace so defined by entertainment, instant self gratification, and personal pleasures that they no longer value civic virtues and the public life”. Which explains the Capitol in a nutshell. Collins has said that the choice of Roman names for the citizens of the Capitol was deliberate as they, just like the Roman Empire, have a fondness for bloodsport as entertainment (e.g. the gladiatorial games). Collins has also said she would have named the series Bread and Circuses/Games (Panem et Circenses) if she could.

Brilliant, brilliant worldbuilding. Every character’s name choice is deliberate, even Katniss’s. Katniss is another name for the arrowhead plant. In addition to being edible, the arrowhead is important to Katniss’s character as an archer–a hunter. And does THE HUNGER GAMES bash you over the head with this information? No. Collins doesn’t force it, allowing the reader to come to the implicit understanding of Panem’s culture. There is such richness and such nuance here. Does it surprise anyone that CATCHING FIRE was #1 on the NYT Bestseller list the week it was released? Of course not; it’s a great story well told. But I think Collins’ worldbuilding makes it superb.

Those are my Too Long, Didn’t Read thoughts. What are some books with great worldbuilding you can think of?

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