How a pebble becomes a planet
Yes, yes, more process when I should be writing narrative, but bear with me a bit. I want to talk about how you build out a world from nothing.
When I started writing Dragon Jade Chronicle: The Warlock and the Warrior the only thing I had was a very old idea: a thief meets a mysterious green knight, discovers he has magic powers. The knight turns out to be a woman, they fall in love.
(I also knew it was going to have lots of salacious content, because I’m an adult and I can get away with that)
You’ll note that, at the core of the book, this is still, essentially, a two sentence summary of the story, only without any of the conflict. And, of course, conflict is what propels any narrative, so how did that happen?
The one other detail I had before I even sat down to write the book was that there’d be an item called dragon jade, a rare substance in the main characters’ culture, but a very important and numerous substance among barbarians.
So, then, of course, we had a conflict: powerful barbarians invade, just as our heroes are discovering they’re in love. Romance! Danger! Worlds colliding! You could fill a ‘30s pulp reel with this stuff.
Of course, there’s not 160,000 words in that, which is how long The Warlock and The Warrior ended up being.
When I write a first draft, most of it is letting the characters move on their own terms. I have an outline, but sometimes the characters refuse to go there. Sometimes they insert things that I hadn’t outlined. The whole political system of Tia Vashil comes from a necessary tension: Kiera is an important person, but the Guild rules the city. Thus, the Five Noble Families (it’s five because it’s more than Four and it’s still alliterative). But then I had to determine what made the Five Noble Families noble. Well, they stopped the Dragon Clans. That made the Clan invasions cyclical...so why was this invasion important?
If you’ve read the book, you’re probably beginning to understand: each little detail feeds another. Because I’d determined the Dragon Clans had invaded before, I created Jorga as a nemesis. Because I needed Jorga to be a sorcerer, I made necromancy a forbidden art in the Guild. It’s basically “For Want of a Nail...” Narrative Structure Edition (tm).
The thing I find interesting is that if you back up and consider the whole work, it seems extremely complex, where there’s a whole political system and cultural clash at play, running while the actual story of two people falling in love and having an adventure (and copious amounts of sex. We mustn’t forget the sex). It looks daunting, from the outside. When I started writing, it seemed daunting as well. How did all those authors weave such large tapestries? They must have been planning for ages! No wonder Tolkien was an Oxford don!
But inside, it’s pretty simple: If A, then B. If B, then C, and so on and so forth. The more you make those recursive (If A, then B. If B, then C. If C, then A & D. If C & D, then B) the more the world comes alive and feels alive and used. I probably oversimplified it in some places (we don’t meet enough people in Tia Vashil, but I hope to explore that more in a future novel), and didn’t justify it enough in others (if @urukpress had been more ruthless, they would’ve told me to kill my darlings and we would have excised the Canians entirely from the story, as fun as they are).
So, here’s my actionable advice to someone working on their own project and wondering how they produce a world that seems lived in: Pull at every loose thread in the sweater, and then follow it closely as it unravels. And then write that down. It doesn’t all have to end up in the writing. Actually, tip of the iceberg is best, as long as we can look down and see that there’s the outline of an iceberg.
