World Building: How much is too much? · 12:30am Mar 2nd, 2013
Building a world is a lot like preparing for a job interview you know isn't really going to matter. You pretty your world up, straighten its geography, brush out a few nasty stains on the map, and then shove it out the door and hope what you did works.
But in the end, the one thing that really matters is internal consistency. This means that it absolutely does not matter what your world/setting does with itself as long as it makes sense within that world. I see many people fret about whether they can see whether or not this or that idea "works" inside of the world of Friendship is Magic. But the real beauty of the setting we work with is that just about anything can work with it! The creators of the show gave us a basic map of Equestria, a few nuggets of ideas, and made small slice of life stories that don't tell us much about the world at large. Questions like: why do ponies have teacups? How do they hold things with their hooves? What do other countries think about a nation that is somehow successfully basing everything on the idea that friendship is magic? There are so many blank spaces to fill you should not worry about how an idea "works" with FIM; the devil comes in the details of what you bring to the table. Likewise, any worldbuilding idea can work so long as you make the reader believe it makes sense.
When presenting an internally consistent world, consider what is and is not normal for characters. How your characters react to things is generally how the reader will get a sense of how the world works. If someone points at a ten-legged bug-eyed creature and screams, "What is that thing?!" then we can assume that ten-legged bug-eyed creatures don't normally wander around in the open. But if someone instead plays catch with the critter, you have introduced an entirely new idea: ten-legged bug-eyed creatures are normal for the characters, so they're normal for you now too. Avoid having them suddenly kill and eat the critter the very next page to prevent dissonance, unless your protagonist enjoys animal abuse.
After that, think carefully on why the character doesn't think the critter is abnormal, or consider why it is abnormal. Is it a beast of burden? A pet? Another sentient being? A ravaging monster that eats brains? Give everything in the story a certain role to fulfill, and most readers will accept it at face value. When I read the Hobbit, I really didn't care about the anatomy or biology of hobbits and trolls. I didn't care that they "weren't supposed to exist." I just accepted that they existed somehow because that was what the story told me. Hobbits had hairy feet and were good. Trolls lived in caves and were evil. They had their own histories and origins that explained most of these characteristics. That's all I needed to know. When I read in other works that drow have levitation magic or hyperspace just makes ships go faster than light, I accept that too because it doesn't break the story's internal set of rules. Also, I'm not an astrophysicist or a professional wizard, so I didn't actually care.
Anything beyond this is utterly superfluous. Remember that you don't necessarily need to go too far when describing any aspect of the world. Let's do a quick example.
The scroot is a small, furry mammal with a long, sinuous body and six legs. The latter four are used for locomotion, and the remaining two are powerful digging claws mainly used in socialization and burrowing. Its entire body, save for its head, tail, and paws is covered in thick fur ranging from brown to black. It lives in the thick undergrowth of deep forests and is omnivorous, feeding on insects, small mammals, and berries. Generally, they are not dangerous at all to humans.
There. I have just described a new kind of creature that you will now believe exists in my story. Do we have to know its evolutionary biology? Do you, the author, have to consider why it has six legs, and not ten, fifty, or a thousand? Not really, no. Nobody's going to care about those details because they will detract from the story. I did, however, make sure that the creature is something that feels grounded in reality, or at least the reality of the story: it has six legs because it has two big digging claws at the front. It uses these claws to burrow. It burrows for food. It does not suddenly transform into an utterly different creature completely at random. It is not a Tyrannosaurus Rex trying to eat plaster for no reason. This creature, no matter how alien, has its own set of rules and follows them. Make it make sense in the world you create, make it consistent,and you can do whatever you want.
Internal consistency is one of the reasons Friendship is Magic works so well. We're told that Celestia and Luna "raise the Sun and the Moon." Does this mean the universe is heliocentric? Does it work the same way our solar system does? Are the Sun and Moon small, huge, illusory, sentient?
In the end, who cares? It works in the context of the show, and the show isn't about the solar system, it's about the ponies. The Sun and Moon don't move on their own. We accept this ludicrous statement because that's just how the world works. And the lack of an answer actually opens up the creativity for us! We can make up any reason we like as to why the world is the way it is, and they are all valid as long as they are consistent within that world. Likewise, consider what kind of world you have created. Whatever the focus of that world is, is what you should pay the most attention to. Let the reader worry, postulate, and hypothesize about everything else. That's half the fun of reading a book. Leaving some of the mystery open-ended encourages people to stay interested.
Very soon you will be able to make Cthulu sit down for tea with Scootaloo, and nobody will raise an eyebrow at it. Their minds will be too busy exploding from seeing the Elder God in all his tentacular glory.
You're like a little philosopher.
I loath the fact I can not currently reply in full, but a fantastic microcosmic overview of a concept I hold dear.
Details might not be necessary to create a believable world, but I have to say that they're damn fun and go a long way to enhancing the story and immersing the reader in the world they're reading about. While it's true that it's fun to theorize about such details and try to fill in the gaps with what we can think of, it's even more fun to have the author fill in those details for us with things that we couldn't think of. That's part of the reason the reader is sitting there reading your story after all; likely you the author are a more creative storyteller than they are. We're already enjoying the story you've written for us, why wouldn't we enjoy the ideas you have for the world behind this story even more?
I certainly won't begrudge you leaving certain details to the reader's imagination, a bit of mystery does go a long way in enhancing a story. But please don't think we don't care to hear your ideas for your worlds; we love them! I do, anyway. Then again I'm a sucker for backstory.
I agree. Internal consistency is extremely important, and showing off your worldbuilding when all it does is distract the reader from the actual story would detract from the story.
Of course, it's always a good idea for the author to have a very complete picture of their world, even if the reader will only learn a fraction of what the 880111
I agree, as long as the details don't crowd out the story. Ultimately, when you flesh out a whole world the reader will only see a fraction of that world. There's no reason to explain to the reader why something works (unless it's relevant to the plot), but it's always good for the author to know in order to maintain internal consistency and to help immersion. With immersion, it would really just be small things, no big info-dumps or anything. Maybe the character sees a newspaper or hears something on the TV about some or other event going on. Or maybe the character moved to a new city and he complains that it's always raining there.
Of course, while making a climate model and mapping out high and low pressure zones would be a lot of work for just one character's comments on the weather (and you certainly don't want to explain wind patterns and rain shadows to the reader unless climatology is somehow plot-relevant), it can be useful if you want to make a larger, internally consistent, and living world where many stories can take place.